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One of Dachau’s last living liberators still has somewhere to be
ATLANTA — Hilbert “Hibby” Margol wears two watches.
It is the kind of detail that seems small until you can’t stop noticing it. One watch is ordinary. It has hands, numbers, the plain mechanics of telling time. The other is a Life Alert, the sort of device sold to people who live alone, or to the people who love them and can’t stand the thought of them living alone.
Together the two watches say something about a man before he’s said a word himself: that he has outlived the need for almost everything, except the people determined to make sure he’s still here.
He is 102. He lives by himself in the same two-story house in suburban Atlanta he shared with his wife of 77 years, Betty Ann, who died at 96 last September. The house still carries the warmth of her memory. Family photographs cover every surface that will hold them: the mantel, the end tables, the walls, climbing toward the ceiling like something that grew there on its own.
There will soon be one more: Hibby’s fourth great-granddaughter, Callie Rose, was born two weeks ago.
A framed photograph of French President Emmanuel Macron pinning the Legion d’Honneur to Margol’s chest — taken in 2024, when Margol was one of dozens of American veterans Delta Airlines chartered to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day — leans against the fireplace, not yet hung, as if the house has simply run out of room to keep up with the life still happening inside it.
The coffee table has disappeared beneath medals and ephemera and the accumulated evidence of a hundred years, and it occurs to you, sitting across from him, that you are not in the home of a man winding down. You are in the home of a man still arriving.
His iPhone buzzed. Then again. He glanced at it and rolled his eyes.
“That’s my daughter,” he said. “Checking on me.”
His daughter is, herself, a senior citizen. The phone had no case — hadn’t needed one, he doesn’t drop things — which felt like its own kind of answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked: What does it look like to move through a century without ever quite losing your grip?
On the day I visited this June, he had just returned from yet another trip to Normandy, marking another anniversary of a war he’d fought in as a young man and had spent most of the rest of his life not talking about. A week before that, the Atlanta Braves had honored him on the field on Memorial Day for the second year in a row.
For six decades, Margol said almost nothing about what he had seen at the end of that war — not to his wife, not to his three children, not to anyone. And then, in his 80s, he started to talk about it, and he has not really stopped since.
Margol is sharing his experience as one of a dwindling number of U.S. Army veterans alive today who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
Inside the camp
He and his identical twin brother, Howard — younger by ten minutes — served together in the war. That alone took some doing: the military generally kept siblings apart, a policy hardened after five Sullivan brothers died together when their ship sank in 1942. (It’s loosely the premise behind Saving Private Ryan.) It took a letter from the Margols’ mother to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to get an exception made.
On the morning of April 29, 1945, the brothers were on the outskirts of Munich when they caught a strange, powerful smell drifting out of the woods.
Howard was the one who placed it. It reminded him of an unpleasant odor he would sometimes catch a whiff of in their mother’s kosher kitchen back home in Jacksonville, Florida — the way she would hold a freshly killed chicken over the gas flame of the stove to singe off the last of its pin feathers. Only this stench was much, much stronger.
The brothers went to find the source. What they came to first was a line of boxcars. The first one they reached had its sliding door open. A dead man’s leg was dangling out of it. They opened the cars and found them packed with dead bodies in striped prisoner uniforms “like sardines,” Hibby would say.
They had a small camera, liberated from a dead German officer a few weeks earlier, and they used it to take a photograph of one of the cars — a copy of which hangs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
They pressed further into the woods and came out at another clearing. Above the entrance was a sign: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work will set you free.
They had found Dachau.
Beyond the gate was a wide-open yard ringed by low barracks buildings — and, in several places, bodies stacked the way you’d stack cordwood. The arrangement of them is the part that refused to make sense. Somebody had piled them, neatly, as routine.
Neither brother had ever seen anything like it. “We didn’t understand what we were looking at,” Margol said. “It sort of reminded us of a movie set.”
They learned only later that the camp’s ovens had run out of coal months earlier, and without coal, there was no way to cremate the bodies. So the corpses had simply been left where they lay.
It took a moment to register that not everyone in the yard was dead. Off to one side, against a barracks wall, were four or five prisoners — some squatting, some just standing, none of them well. But alive.
The camp’s roughly 32,000 prisoners walked free later that same day, once a Swiss Red Cross negotiator talked the SS commander into a peaceful surrender rather than a last stand.
Years later, at a visit to mark the liberation’s 70th anniversary, an elderly survivor found Margol after a memorial service. She told him she’d been too sick with typhus that morning to understand what was happening around her. Then she leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks. “If you guys were two or three days later,” she told him, “I wouldn’t have made it.”
One family, two branches
I’ve spent much of the past year following a different story: a family of cattle farmers in rural Illinois, building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield out of the remains of closing synagogues — a Torah rescued from one congregation, an ark from another, stained-glass windows carried out of buildings that no longer exist. The building will also include a museum of tolerance, sharing the stories of the family’s ancestors — some who died in concentration camps, others who survived by being hidden in the homes of Christian families.
The family is named Jakobs. You’ve met the 41-year-old farmer, Nik, in stories I’ve written about the Pennsylvania synagogue he dismantled, piece by piece, to save it; the groundbreaking of the new one rising in a field; and the family’s roots in the Netherlands, where his grandmother, Edith, spent nearly three years hidden in a farmhouse. This spring, I flew with the family to Stadskanaal, the small Dutch town that was her family’s refuge, to watch a local theater troupe stage a play about her survival.
It was in the Netherlands, reporting Jakobs’ story, that he first mentioned a name: Hibby. Jakob’s brother Bryce who left the farm for a career of his own, is married to one of Margol’s granddaughters. Margol’s great-granddaughters carry both halves of this history. On one side: relatives murdered in the Holocaust, and ancestors who survived it in hiding. On the other: a soldier who helped liberate one of the camps.
I asked Margol what he made of it. He didn’t reach for anything grand. “Well,” he said, “it’s quite a story.”
The silence
For decades, Margol said almost nothing about Dachau to his family. “We had written letters,” he said of the war years. “We figured that was sufficient.”
Life moved on. Margol built a business selling furniture and appliances. He raised a family. The war became something that had happened to a younger man.
Then came an invitation.
In 2012, at 88, Margol joined about a dozen other American liberators on the International March of the Living, traveling to Poland with Holocaust survivors and thousands of Jewish teenagers. For the first time since the war, he wasn’t simply remembering what he’d witnessed. He was walking beside people whose lives had continued because soldiers like him had arrived when they did.
“It was such an emotional experience,” he later recalled of walking from Auschwitz to Birkenau, “that when I got home I said, now I have to start talking about it.”
His first talk was at the public library near his home. More than 90 people showed up, on word of mouth alone. Then came another invitation. And another. Synagogues. Churches. High schools. A World War II roundtable. Adult education classes at Emory University. He stopped counting after 200 presentations. Today, he estimates he’s given close to 300.
But talking about Dachau and reliving it are not the same thing. Years ago, touring the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with a small group, he had to walk through a boxcar on exhibit to continue the tour — cleaner and newer-looking than the one he remembered, but a boxcar all the same. “Emotionally,” he said, “I broke down.”
For most of his life, Margol had carried the story alone. Now he worried what would happen if no one carried it after him.
In September, Margol is returning to Germany with his son Jerry, 74 — this trip courtesy of the Best Defense Foundation, the veterans organization that has taken the two of them to battlefields around Europe, and which is now making a documentary about Margol and another veteran. The itinerary is still coming together, but it includes a stop that father and son have made together twice before: Dachau.
The next generation
Long before Margol began speaking publicly about the Holocaust, he had already spent years building Jewish life closer to home.
Rabbi Mark Zimmerman saw it firsthand. Zimmerman retired this summer after leading Congregation Beth Shalom in Atlanta for 38 years. He met Margol in 1988, when the rabbi arrived and Margol was, as he put it, “a young man of sixty-something.”
“He still comes to synagogue,” Zimmerman said. “He’s still sharp as a tack.”
But what Zimmerman remembers most isn’t Margol’s longevity. It’s what he built.
In the late 1990s, Beth Shalom needed an educational wing. Before the congregation had raised a dollar toward the project, Margol quietly wrote a $100,000 check so the synagogue could hire a professional fundraiser and launch the campaign. He and fellow congregant Stephen Klein later donated roughly $350,000 each to complete the building.
Today the Klein-Margol Educational Wing houses the congregation’s preschool, administrative offices, chapel, library and youth lounge.
“In many ways,” Zimmerman said, “I owe my staying at Beth Shalom to Hibby and his vision. We still have a tremendous preschool because of that original vision.”
Only years later did Zimmerman learn another part of Margol’s legacy, about liberating Dachau. Margol recently gave Zimmerman a copy of the memoir he and his son self-published, becoming one of the congregation’s living links to the Holocaust.
“His firsthand account is such a rare commodity,” Zimmerman said, “in a world where primary witnesses, for the most part, are dying out.”
Nearly 800 miles away, in Sterling, Illinois, the other side of Margol’s family is at work on a version of the same project. Jakobs is building a synagogue, with a museum inside so his grandmother’s story outlives her. Margol has already seen how it turns out — his wing has held preschoolers for a quarter century. Jakobs broke ground this spring.
A hat, a promise
I asked Margol if I could take his picture before I left. “Let me get my baseball hat,” he said, and disappeared into another part of the house.
It’s the one with the patch of the 42nd Infantry Division — the Rainbow Division, one of the liberating forces at Dachau. The nickname dates to 1917, coined by a young Col. Douglas MacArthur because the division’s ranks were drawn from National Guard units in 27 different states.
Room by room, the 102-year-old wandered through his home looking for the hat. He checked the kitchen. He looked at the hook by the door, where another cap was hanging, then shook his head and kept going.
There was something almost unbearably ordinary about it, set against everything he’d just spent hours telling me. The boxcars. The smell. The gate. And now: Where did I put that hat?
He found it, and came back into the room wearing it — the same hat, more or less, that has sat on his head in front of hundreds of audiences by now. He still says yes to the invitations. He still boards planes to Europe. When I asked what all of it was for, he didn’t hesitate.
“I hope and pray,” he said, “that the offspring of all the Holocaust survivors outlive the offspring of the deniers.”
The Holy Ground reporting project is made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.
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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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