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Overdue or overdone? Two scholars hope to secure the legacy of ‘Jewish Renewal’
(JTA) — Rabbi Arthur Green gave the commencement address last week at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship where he was ordained 56 years earlier.
His talk was mostly a response to political turmoil in Israel, but he also urged the graduates to pioneer a “new Judaism.”
“I had the good fortune, as a young seeker, to run into the Jewish mystical tradition, especially the writings of the early Hasidic masters,” said Green, who taught Jewish mysticism and Hasidic theology at Brandeis, the University of Pennsylvania and Hebrew College. “I have been working for half a century to articulate what could simply be called a Judaism for adults living in freedom. I am now near the end of my creative course. But you young people are just at the beginning of yours. We need you to enroll — however you can — in the task of the generations, that of re-creating Judaism.”
That is the language of Jewish Renewal, with which Green, 82, is deeply identified. Renewal isn’t a denomination, really, but a movement that was born in and reflects the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Baby boomer Jews disillusioned with the large suburban synagogues that they considered soulless embraced Jewish practice that was spiritual, egalitarian, environmentally conscious and largely lay-led.
Baby boomer Jews disillusioned with the large suburban synagogues that they considered soulless embraced Jewish practice that was spiritual, egalitarian, environmentally conscious and largely lay-led. Renewal’s signature institution was the havurah — intimate prayer, study and social fellowships. Its soundtrack were the liturgical melodies composed by the hippy-ish, “neo-Hasidic” Orthodox rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach. And its rebbe — to the degree that an egalitarian movement had a central figure — was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924-2014), a refugee from Hitler’s Europe and former Lubavitcher Hasid whose Judaism channeled the spiritual “New Age” of the 1970s.
These ideas and approaches may be familiar to you even if you’ve never heard of “Renewal.” Rare is the synagogue that doesn’t try to offer a more intimate spiritual experience for its worshippers, to shrink the distance between pulpit and pew, to incorporate new Jewish music and, in non-Orthodox and a number of Modern Orthodox synagogues, to increase the participation of women in prayer and study.
Those prayer shawls with rainbow stripes? That was a Schachter-Shalomi innovation.
How a counterculture movement came to be absorbed by the mainstream is the subject of a paper in a new collection, “The Future of American Judaism,” edited by Mark Silk and Jerome Chanes. Chanes is the co-author, with Shaul Magid, of the chapter on “Renewal” that claims it as one of the most influential if not defining Jewish movements of the last 50 years.
“While Jewish Renewal has never boasted a large number of members, its influence on the larger American Jewish community has been significant, in terms of its liturgical experimentation, its revisions of ritual and its overall metaphysics,” they write. “It has also served as an ongoing conduit of information and inspiration from its own past — the havurah movement, radical politics, feminism — to the next generation.”
I came to the paper after giving a lecture at my own synagogue on “The Crisis of the American Synagogue.” I spoke of declining affiliation rates, plunging enrollment in supplementary schools, the shrinking number of non-Orthodox synagogues. Most of my adult life has been spent in synagogues, havurot and institutions heavily influenced by Renewal. If the Jewish Renewal movement revitalized synagogue life in the last century, could it also be blamed for its struggles in this one?
Magid, a fellow in Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, and Chanes, an adjunct professor of Jewish Studies at Baruch College, presented their chapter at a conference dedicated to the release of the book, held Tuesday and Wednesday at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Magid made the claim — considered bold, at this small gathering of Jewish historians — that the three most important Jewish figures of the 20th century were Mordecai Kaplan, Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Shachter-Shalomi.
Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, downplayed the supernatural element of Judaism and instead called it a “civilization” defined by its people and culture. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, turned an insular Orthodox sect into an outreach movement that promotes ritual practice among secular Jews.
Rabbi Arthur Green delivers the commencement address at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, May 18, 2023. (Courtesy JTS)
Schachter-Shalomi combined their visions and imagined a Judaism, said Magid, that “is no longer used as a tool for Jewish survival, but rather as a project for Jews to become part of the global community, to contribute to the global community.” Environmental awareness became a hallmark of Renewal, as did absorbing influences from other religions, especially Eastern ones. “He really did take Schneerson’s teaching about bringing Judaism to the streets and expanded it further to bring Judaism to the mosque, to bring Judaism to the monastery, to create another way of being Jewish which was not afraid of the world.”
In an interview with Magid before the conference, I asked if he and Chanes might be exaggerating Renewal’s influence.
“I’m sure there will be people who will claim that case but I don’t think so, no,” he said. Magid acknowledges that few people regard themselves as direct disciples of Schachter-Shalomi, and yet, like Kaplan, his influence is felt widely and deeply. “Each one of them had a futuristic vision,” he said. “They were able to cultivate a way of thinking about Judaism that was before their time and that eventually came into being in many ways.”
One of those skeptical of Schachter-Shalomi’s influence is Jonathan Sarna, professor of Jewish history at Brandeis, who gave the keynote talk at the conference. In his response to the panel on Renewal, Sarna doubted Schachter-Shalomi was as influential as Carlebach, the Conservative theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel or the Modern Orthodox philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik. “I don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that every innovator is a new Moses,” Sarna said.
Benjamin Steiner, a visiting assistant professor in religion at Trinity, also wondered if Renewal had spread “everywhere in the country, or only in large urban areas with critical masses of educated Jewish students.”
Listening to Magid’s response to such caveats, I thought of the quote often attributed to music producer Brian Eno: “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” Renewal’s influence spread beyond its founding havurot because many of their principals went on to important positions in academia and Jewish organizations, including Green, Rabbi Everett Gendler, Sharon Strassfeld, John Ruskay and Rabbi Arthur Waskow.
Small but influential Gen X and millennial institutions also bear Renewal’s fingerprints: the “Jewish Emergent Network” of independent congregations; New York’s Romemu and B’nai Jeshurun synagogues; egalitarian, traditional-style yeshivas like Hadar. Bayit, with a number of principals associated with ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, is an online artist’s collective and publisher of Jewish books, including a forthcoming Shabbat prayer book.
One of its contributors, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who was ordained by ALEPH, has argued that the influence of Renewal is felt even within Orthodoxy. “If you look at the Open Orthodoxy movement, if you look at the ordination of women as ‘maharats’ [by Yeshivat Maharat, a women’s seminary], the future of women as rabbinic leaders in Orthodoxy is already here,” she said on an episode of the “Judaism Unbound” podcast. “It’s not everywhere, but someday it will be.”
Magid and Chanes similarly claim a number of leading Jewish feminists as products of Renewal — they mention Paula Hyman, Eva Fogelman and Judith Plaskow — although some in the audience at Trinity insisted they gave Renewal too much credit for a movement by and for women. In there essay in the Silk/Chanes Book, Sylvia Barack Fishman of Brandeis University offers a counter-narrative of Jewish innovation over the past 50 years. In her chapter, she credits the “active partnership” of women in revitalizing American Judaism: Women’s religious expressions, she writes, “create social contexts and are distinguished by a communal dynamic, quite unlike the isolated, personalized Jewish experience, which some have claimed defines contemporary Jewishness.”
I came away convinced that Renewal has had an outsize influence on Jewish life, especially for baby boomers like me. But I also wondered if its outward-facing, syncretic Judaism failed to instill a sense of obligation to Jewish forms, institutions and peoplehood — unlike, by contrast, Orthodoxy in all of its booming present-day manifestations.
I asked Magid in what ways Renewal might have fallen short.
“Part of its failure is that it is very, very anchored to a certain kind of American counterculture that no longer exists. It hasn’t really moved into a 2.0 phase,” he said. “There are students and staff members that are still very tied to [Schachter-Shalomi’s] vision, and then there’s a younger generation, Gen Z, who have read some of his work and they’re influenced by it, but they really are thinking much more about, well, how does this translate into a post-countercultural America?”
Magid also feels the ideas of Renewal will become more important as American Jews’ attachment to Israel wanes, and the living memory of the Holocaust recedes.
If Rabbi Green’s speech at the JTS graduation was any indication, then the ideals of Jewish Renewal still hold their appeal.
“We need a new Judaism in America… where we also have the fresh air needed to create it,” he said. “How do we move forward… in articulating a Jewish theology for today that is both intellectually honest and spiritually rewarding?”
The audience of future Jewish leaders and teachers leapt to its feet.
—
The post Overdue or overdone? Two scholars hope to secure the legacy of ‘Jewish Renewal’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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All American Jews should acknowledge Nakba Day — for Israel’s sake, and Palestine’s
Many American Jews were raised with the word “Nakba” absent from our vocabularies.
We were taught, correctly, about the miracle of Israel’s founding; the refuge Israel provided after the Holocaust; and the flourishing of Jewish life in our ancestral homeland. What went unmentioned was the other side of that joy: the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, the name by which the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel is known through the Arab world.
For Palestinians, the Nakba is the defining experience of their collective life — carried in family histories, in refugee camps and in the enduring statelessness of millions. It is living memory, not ancient history. The remarkable story of Israel’s creation is real, essential and worth celebrating. But it’s time that all Jews — Zionists alongside anti-Zionists — acknowledge that it was never the only story.
Acknowledging Nakba Day — an annual commemoration on May 15 — can feel uncomfortable, even threatening. There is a fear within much of the Jewish community that recognizing Palestinian loss will in some way undermine Jewish claims to self-determination, or feed efforts to delegitimize Israel.
I understand that fear. I lead a Jewish organization with Zionist roots; I feel this tension in my daily work and life. But I also believe this fear is misguided.
When we deny or minimize the full history of 1948, we deny not just the humanity and pain of the Palestinian people, but also our own honest understanding of today’s reality. For Jewish leaders struggling to understand why younger American Jews won’t simply follow their lead when it comes to support for Israel, this is part of the answer.
When we avoid learning and teaching about the Nakba, we do not make Palestinian loss disappear. Rather, we simply reinforce the perception that we are unwilling to confront this essential part of Israel’s story.
And when we expand our historical understanding we do not weaken our connection to Israel, or that of our children. On the contrary, we strengthen it. A relationship built on selective memory is fragile and incomplete. One grounded in truth — even uncomfortable truth — is far more honest and resilient.
The best reasons to commemorate Nakba Day are the moral mandate to recognize the truth, the value of opening a door to allow for transformational relationships.
Two truths can coexist. It is true the establishment of Israel was a moment of profound liberation for the Jewish people, and it is equally true that it was a moment of profound loss for Palestinians. Holding both facts is not easy. To do so challenges the binary narratives many of us were raised with. But maturity — personal and communal — requires sitting with complexity rather than retreating from it.
Embracing that complexity carries real world implications.
The dismissal of Palestinian grievances is already harming Israel, degrading security and imperiling the country’s future as an integral part of the Middle East. That rejection salts the soil in which deep relationships between Israeli Jews and their Arab neighbors might otherwise take root.
Durable peace will not come from either side insisting that their narrative is the only legitimate one. It will come — if it comes at all — from mutual recognition of history, suffering and shared humanity.
For Jews and Jewish organizations to acknowledge Nakba Day can be one small step in that direction. Doing so would signal a willingness to listen, learn and take Palestinian perspectives seriously. That is an expression of respect that any shared future requires.
To American Jews who find this proposal uncomfortable: It is time for some courage. The easy path is silence. That silence will bring us more isolation, and hamper our capacity to foster relationships grounded in trust with Palestinians. The harder path is to expand our understanding, starting with a more complete and honest account of the past.
Jewish tradition gives us a framework for exactly this kind of engagement.. We regularly recount our own moments of vulnerability, exile and moral failure. We imagine ourselves as slaves departing Egypt and remind ourselves of the ethical obligations that follow. Applying that same ethic in the present day does not betray our story. It honors it.
Commemorating Nakba Day recognizes that the past shapes the present. It embraces intellectual and moral honesty. It affirms that Palestinian lives and histories matter and must coexist alongside Jewish lives and history.
In a time of deep polarization — within the Jewish community, between Israelis and Palestinians, and across American society — the temptation is to retreat into camps, to draw sharper lines and to insist on simpler stories. Giving in to that temptation will not lead us to a future of peace, justice, and mutual dignity.
Instead, we need to complicate our narratives. We need to listen more than we speak. And we need to find ways to honor the humanity of those whose experiences do not mirror our own. Recognizing Nakba Day on May 15 is a good place to start.
The post All American Jews should acknowledge Nakba Day — for Israel’s sake, and Palestine’s appeared first on The Forward.
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Are You Doing Everything You Can to Reach Out to Your Fellow Jews?
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
While Israel and the US have been fighting against Iran side-by-side over the past few months, I heard the story of an Air Force cadet that inspired me.
The Air Force graduate in question, Joel Usher, appeared in a TikTok video and stood at attention during his graduation ceremony, knowing no family was coming. No friends either. In the military, when you complete basic training, someone has to physically “tap you out” at the end of the ceremony. It is a moment of recognition, a moment of arrival. And Joel had no one.
Then a fellow trainee found him in the crowd and stepped forward. He tapped him out.
Joel said he felt “proud, relieved, and grateful all at once.” He could barely hold back the tears. Millions of people saw that video and understood exactly why.
I watched it and immediately thought of shul.
How many times have you walked into a synagogue you did not know and stood there feeling invisible? You look around, and no one looks back. You do not know when to turn the page. You do not know the melodies. You are standing in the middle of a celebration that was not built for you, at least not on that particular morning. Then, if you are lucky, someone walks over. They hand you a siddur open to the right place. They say, “Do you have somewhere for Shabbat?”
That small gesture is a “tap out.” It is someone saying, “You belong here, and I am going to make sure you know it.”
The problem is that it does not happen nearly enough.
Our observant communities have grown enormously in recent years. Walk into almost any Orthodox or traditional shul on a Shabbat morning, and the room is full. But a room full of people does not mean a room full of connection. A crowded room can still be a lonely room if no one reaches beyond their own circle.
And right now, the stakes could not be higher.
So many Jews today are searching. They are rattled by the world outside, by the antisemitism that has exploded in ways many of them never expected to see in their lifetime. They are watching what is happening in Israel and feeling something stir inside them that they do not have words for yet. They are close, many of them. They are standing right at the edge of something real.
And we know them. They are our doctors, our accountants, our neighbors, the people we see at our kids’ games on Sunday morning. They are Jewish. They are family. They just have not had someone tap them out yet.
That is what family does, actually. Family does not wait to be asked. Family notices when someone is struggling. Family knows when something is wrong before the person says a word. Family shows up.
Being Jewish means being part of a family that stretches across continents and centuries. That is the whole idea. And a family that only shows up for people inside its immediate circle is not really living up to what family means.
So here is my question. What are you actually doing with that? When you walk into shul and see someone standing alone, looking lost, do you cross the room? When you sit next to a Jewish colleague who never grew up with any of this, do you ever think to send them something worth reading — a Shabbat thought, a piece of Torah that might actually speak to them? When Passover is coming, do you pick up the phone and say, “You should be at our table”?
Joel’s friend could have assumed someone else would handle it. He could have told himself it was not his place. Instead, he walked over.
The most powerful moments in a person’s life are rarely the grand gestures. They are the quiet ones. The siddur passed across the aisle. The invitation that was extended without waiting to be asked. The text message on a Friday afternoon that says, “Thinking of you, here is something I found beautiful this week.”
We are all surrounded by Jews who need to be tapped out. The only question is whether we are paying enough attention to notice them standing there, waiting.
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The Other Iranian Energy Crisis: How Israeli Gas Disruptions Will Cost the Jewish State’s Economy
The production platform of Leviathan natural gas field is seen in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Haifa, northern Israel June 9, 2021. Picture taken June 9, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Amir Cohen
The global oil shock created by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz obscured a second energy crisis that unfolded much closer to Israel’s borders. The month-long shutdown of Israel’s Leviathan and Karish gas fields, caused by repeated Iranian and Hezbollah missile attacks, was the longest gas export disruption since Israel began supplying gas to Jordan and Egypt.
This interruption, the third in the past two years, exposed how dependent Israel’s neighbors have become on Israeli gas for electricity generation, and reinforced a broader strategic lesson for them.
Viewing Israeli supplies as unreliable, Jordan, Egypt and even Syria are now more likely to deepen hedging strategies by expanding renewables, maintaining costly backup fuels, increasing liquefied natural gas (LNG) flexibility, and looking for alternative regional transport and energy corridors. The bright side is that this shift may strengthen the case for IMEC (the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) by reframing it less as a Europe-oriented transit initiative and more as a domestic infrastructure project for ensuring intra-regional energy security.
The East Mediterranean energy crisis that accompanied the Iran war was distinct from the better-known oil crisis centered on Hormuz. Israel’s wartime safety procedures forced it to shut down its northern Leviathan and Karish gas fields and divert all the gas from its single remaining field (Tamar) to serve the Israeli market at the expense of its export commitments to Jordan and Egypt.
The Leviathan gas field, the largest source of Israeli gas, eventually resumed operations on April, 2, 2026, 32 days after its initial shutdown. Karish opened a week later on April 9, 2026. Together, these closures mark the longest gas supply disruption since Israel began exporting gas to its neighbors, and the third major disruption following the eruption of the Gaza War on October 7, 2023 and the 12-day war with Iran that took place in June 2025.
The importance of these supply disruptions lies not only in their immediate economic effects, but in the fact that they have become recurrent. From the perspective of Israel’s neighbors, the problem is no longer a one-off technical interruption but a recurring pattern of conflict-driven unreliability. That unreliability is concerning because Israeli gas has become structurally important to the region’s power sectors. In 2025, Israel’s natural gas exports to Egypt and Jordan grew by 13%, reaching about 13.2 BCM – an amount that is set to increase significantly over the next 15 years, to an additional 130 BCM, following Israel’s landmark gas deal with Egypt in 2025.
Jordan is especially exposed to this dependence, as natural gas accounts for roughly 68% of its electricity generation and Israeli gas supplies over half of that gas demand.
During the disruption, Jordanian officials moved quickly to reassure the public that the power supply would remain stable, but the emergency steps they took highlighted the depth of the problem.
The National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) had to shift parts of its electricity generation to heavy fuel oil and diesel at a time when oil prices were at a record high and diesel was in short supply worldwide. Jordan had to tap into its limited petroleum stockpiles, import additional LNG cargoes through Aqaba at a higher cost, and reduce gas deliveries to its industry. These measures preserved grid stability, but at significant cost. Jordan’s energy minister stated that substituting diesel for natural gas raised NEPCO’s daily operating costs by about 1.8 million Jordanian dinars (~2.5m USD) and that its strategic reserves were being quickly depleted. The actual fiscal burden is likely to be much higher than that, and does not take into account the additional cost of refilling depleted stockpiles in the months ahead.
Egypt is less dependent on Israeli gas than Jordan, but it too faced a major challenge following the disruption.
Israeli gas accounts for about 15-20% of Egypt’s total gas consumption, and Egypt’s electricity sector is overwhelmingly gas-dependent. Unlike in June 2025, when Egyptian fertilizer producers were forced to halt operations after Israeli gas imports dropped, the steps taken by Egypt during the March-April 2026 crisis point to a broader emergency response.
Cairo increased LNG purchases, relied more heavily on alternative fuel imports, and introduced demand-side conservation measures, including early closing hours for shops, restaurants, malls, cinemas, and other venues. Egypt’s LNG receipts reportedly tripled year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, from $560 million to $1.65 billion, while its monthly energy import bill rose sharply as it replaced cheaper Israeli pipeline gas with more expensive LNG and liquid fuel imports. This is a striking development for a country that only a few years ago was hoping to leverage its liquefaction infrastructure and offshore resources to become a major gas exporter; it now relies on gas imports to keep the lights on.
Finally, a third casualty of Israel’s gas closures was Syria, which has been involved since early 2026 in a new gas arrangement with Jordan based on Israeli-sourced gas. In January 2026, Jordan and Syria signed an agreement by which the former would supply the latter with up to 4 million cubic meters of natural gas per day.
Jordanian officials stated that gas deliveries to Syria had already begun on January 1, albeit at much lower volumes than agreed, with the goal of helping Syria operate power plants and reduce chronic electricity shortages. When Israeli production and exports were disrupted at the start of the war, gas flows from Jordan to Syria declined or stopped, worsening Syrian power shortages. These developments underscore the extent to which Syria’s fragile electricity recovery is now linked not only to Jordanian infrastructure and Gulf financing but also to the reliability of Israeli gas supplies.
The strategic implication is that Jordan, Egypt, and Syria are now more likely to view Israeli gas through a dual lens, a process that for Jordan and Egypt had already begun in October 2023. Israel remains attractive as a gas supplier because it is geographically close and is already integrated into regional infrastructure, and its gas is often significantly cheaper than liquefied alternatives.
But repeated wartime interruptions make overdependence increasingly difficult to justify. Even if the political will still exists among all parties to continue energy trade, the risk that supply remains susceptible to frequent war-related precautionary closures and wider regional escalation is too serious to ignore.
As a result, neighboring states are likely to intensify their efforts to diversify both fuel sources and generation structures. The most plausible response is not a complete abandonment of Israeli gas but a strategy of hedging against its interruption. That logic is already visible in Jordan’s reliance on backup fuels and LNG capacity and in Egypt’s move toward large-scale LNG purchases and regasification expansion.
But this trend is also likely to expand interest in non-gas electricity sources, especially renewables. Solar and wind do not provide a full substitute for baseload gas generation, but they can reduce marginal dependence on imported fuel and improve resilience in systems where gas is used primarily for power generation. The political meaning of this shift is that the “green energy transition” in the East Mediterranean will no longer be viewed only as a climate or development issue but as a security issue. The repeated shutdown of Israeli gas exports has made that connection harder to ignore.
The second measure Jordan and Egypt will take is to seek more diversified physical supply routes, whether through domestic exploration, additional import infrastructure, or overland pipeline projects that connect Arab markets more deeply to one another. This includes the long-promoted prospect of oil and gas pipelines from Iraq to Jordan, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, and from Turkey to Syria. This logic applies not only to Jordan and Egypt but also, indirectly, to the wider Levantine energy system. Even where Israeli gas is re-exported, blended, or politically relabeled to find its way to Syria or even Lebanon, the region is still exposed to the same upstream vulnerabilities.
These developments also have implications for how Israel and its partners should think about regional projects such as IMEC (the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), and whether it is a net win or net loss for Israel itself.
If such corridor projects continue to be presented mainly as infrastructure meant to serve Israeli regional interests and European energy needs, they risk appearing politically detached from the immediate needs of neighboring Arab states. In Jordan especially, the overtly Israel-centered regional branding of IMEC remains difficult to sell.
However, if future corridors are framed primarily as tools for East Mediterranean resilience and not as transit corridors for the West, their logic becomes more compelling. A rail, pipeline, or fuel corridor that improves Jordan’s, Syria’s, Lebanon’s and Egypt’s access to alternative supplies, or that deepens connectivity between Arab states before connecting onward to Israel and Europe, is likely to be more politically palatable and strategically sustainable. In this sense, the repeated gas disruptions strengthen the case for IMEC, but only if it treats the East Mediterranean as an energy-consuming region first and an energy exporting region second. The infrastructure itself will still benefit Israel in the long term, but the corridor’s regional acceptability is likely to depend on its being presented as an intra-regional public good rather than a Europe-facing geopolitical flagship.
For Israel, the lesson emerging from these trends is not that gas exports to neighboring states have lost their strategic value, but that gas interdependence alone does not create durable regional energy security.
Israeli gas exports remain one of the few concrete mechanisms linking Israel economically to the region. If Israel wants its gas diplomacy to retain strategic value, it will need to think less in terms of singular export leverage and more in terms of system resilience.
That means hardening offshore infrastructure, improving redundancy, coordinating emergency arrangements with importers, and recognizing that partner states will actively seek alternatives after each disruption. Leviathan’s planned expansion may increase Israel’s export capacity over time, but larger volumes will not by themselves solve the core problem of ensuring reliability under conflict conditions, as the recent war revealed once again.
For Jordan and Egypt, the likely post-crisis response is not disengagement from Israeli gas but a hedging strategy. Jordan will continue using Israeli supply because it remains economically attractive, but it is also likely to preserve and strengthen backup arrangements through Aqaba, reserve fuels, and renewable generation. Egypt, facing a sharper structural gas deficit, will continue buying Israeli gas but will simultaneously expand LNG imports, regasification capacity, and upstream exploration.
The larger implication is that the East Mediterranean should increasingly be understood not only as a potential export platform, but as an energy-consuming region with growing internal interdependence and shared vulnerability. That shift in perspective should encourage policymakers to ask not merely how the region can ship product outward, but how it can better absorb shocks at home. In that sense, the East Mediterranean gas crisis was not a side story to the oil drama that unfolded during the Iran War. It was a warning about the fragility of the region’s emerging gas order, and a signal that future regional strategy must be built around deeper intra-regional connections and shared infrastructure.
Dr. Elai Rettig is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies and a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He specializes in energy geopolitics and national security. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.