The Knesset is dissolving. Elections are coming in October. And I am standing in the Mahane Yehuda market with my kids, watching an old Kurdish vendor arrange tangerines next to a Haredi family haggling over challah, a group of Ethiopian soldiers buying hummus, and a secular couple from the German Colony arguing about where to have coffee, and I am thinking: this is what we are fighting for. This messy, loud, impossible, magnificent country. This city. These people. All of them.
I have been writing about Israel and the Jewish world for a long time. I have also been living it. I moved to Jerusalem, I am raising my children here, and I have spent the better part of thirty years building things rather than just arguing about things. A site that catalogued Nazi web presence before most people knew what the internet was. A festival that brought young Jews together around identity and joy. A community that invested in the next generation of Jewish leaders across six continents. A conference that put Jews and Muslims in the same room and watched what happened when they actually talked to each other. I mention none of this to establish authority. I mention it because everything I am about to argue has been tested in the real world, by real people, and the conclusion I keep arriving at is the same one I arrived at thirty years ago: engagement works. Retreat does not.
Last month I wrote a companion piece about how Netanyahu’s choices had damaged Israel’s standing in America and beyond. It generated two or three times the traffic a normal Jewlicious post gets, sparked long threads on Facebook, and prompted people I had not spoken to in years to reach out and want to talk about it. People agreed, disagreed, pushed back, made me think harder. Good. That is what the piece was for. But a diagnosis without a prescription is just a complaint, and I am not interested in complaints. I am interested in what we do next. So this is the follow-up piece, and it is harder to write, because solutions are always harder than problems, and because the situation has gotten worse since I wrote the first one, and because I love this country and this people too much to pretend otherwise.
Let me tell you what has happened since then. The Knesset passed a death penalty law that applies, in practice, exclusively to Palestinians. An IDF soldier smashed the face of a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer in a Christian village in southern Lebanon and posted it on social media. Another posed a cigarette in the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary. A settler from Peduel ran up behind a French nun near the Cenacle on Mount Zion, shoved her to the ground, and kicked her while she was down. The Religious Freedom Data Center documented 181 incidents of harassment targeting Christians and Christian symbols in Israel in 2025 alone. And now the coalition has collapsed, the Knesset is being dissolved, and Israel is heading to elections in October in a political environment that is simultaneously the most dangerous and the most hopeful it has been in years. Dangerous because the stakes are enormous. Hopeful because elections mean choices, and choices mean that what happens next is not yet determined.
I want to talk about those choices. But first I want to say something that gets lost in almost every version of this conversation, whether it happens on Twitter or in the Knesset or in the comment threads of this very website. I have friends across the full spectrum of Israeli and Jewish life. I have dear friends who are Haredi families in Beit Shemesh who I would trust with my children’s lives, and friends who are so secular they have not set foot in a synagogue since their bar mitzvah, and friends who are outright Kahanists and friends who march with Breaking the Silence, and friends who voted for Netanyahu every single time and friends who have been calling for his resignation since 2019. I disagree with many of them about many things. I would lay my life down for all of them. And when I walk through the shuk with my kids and I watch this city doing what it always does, impossible and sacred and maddening and irreplaceable in the same breath, the thing I feel is not despair. It is urgency. Because all of these people, the Haredi family and the Ethiopian soldiers and the secular couple and the Kurdish vendor, they all want the same basic things. They want Israel to exist. They want it to be safe. They want to be governed justly. They want their children to have a future here. The disagreements are real and they matter. But they are disagreements about means, not about ends. And that shared ground, that covenant of ends, is what this piece is about.
So let me speak honestly to several different readers at once, because I think that is what this moment requires.
To my friends who voted Likud, who care about security and Jewish sovereignty and the hard-won strength of this state, I want to say this. Ben Gvir and Smotrich have not served your values. They have undermined them. When allied governments sanction members of the Israeli cabinet, when their statements appear in International Court of Justice briefs as evidence, when the American Evangelical Ambassador appointed by your preferred American president publicly criticizes the Israeli government for treating Christians as adversaries, that is not strength. That is the erosion of the alliances that make Israeli strength possible. Being proud of Israel and recognizing that these particular men have been strategic liabilities are not mutually exclusive positions. Netanyahu himself has understood this at various points, which is why he has occasionally tried to distance himself from their most extreme statements while continuing to depend on their votes. The question the October election poses is whether the Israeli right can find a way to be strong without being reckless, to be proud without being contemptuous, to defend Jewish sovereignty without handing its enemies their most effective arguments on a silver platter. I believe it can. But it requires honesty about what the last three years have cost.
To my Haredi friends and to everyone who understands why Torah study matters, I want to say something different. I am not going to make the standard secular argument about army service and taxes, because I think that argument, while not wrong, misses something important. I want to make a Torah argument instead. On Sukkot we take the four species, the etrog, the lulav, the hadas, and the aravah, and we bind them together and we pray. The rabbis teach us that these four species represent four types of people within the Jewish community. Those who have both Torah and good deeds. Those who have Torah but lack good deeds. Those who have good deeds but lack Torah. And those who have neither. And the teaching is that we bind them all together because the mitzvah cannot be performed with only the parts we like. Communal unity is not a nice idea. It is a religious requirement. The current arrangement, in which one growing community claims permanent exemption from the obligations that bind the rest, is creating resentment that will eventually harm the Haredi community itself. When the patience of those who serve and pay taxes finally runs out, the Haredi community will not be insulated from the consequences. It will be the first to feel them. We need to find a way to honor genuine Torah scholarship, to protect and nurture the great yeshivot that represent our continuity after the Holocaust’s devastation of European Jewish learning, while also finding a path for the Haredi community to contribute to the society it is a part of. Not because the secular world demands it. Because the Torah demands it.
To everyone who lives in Jerusalem, or who loves it from afar the way diaspora Jews have loved it for two thousand years, I want to say what I feel when I walk through this city with my kids. Jerusalem is the most spiritually charged place I have ever been. The sanctity here is not metaphorical. It is palpable, it is in the stones and the light and the air in the early morning before the city wakes up. But so is the violence and the conflict and the failure. A French nun kicked near the Cenacle by a settler from the West Bank. Entire neighborhoods replaced by luxury apartments for wealthy tourists and absentee owners while the people who actually make this city live and breathe and pray cannot afford to stay. A municipality and a government that seem designed to serve the powerful while the rest struggle with rents that have become a kind of slow eviction notice for everyone who is not rich. The sacred and the profane exist here simultaneously and always have. That is Jerusalem. But loving this city is not a passive condition. It is a demand. It demands that we work to move it toward what it is meant to be rather than what it has been and what it might become again. That obligation is what keeps me here. It is what makes me write pieces like this one. And it is what makes me believe, despite everything, that October matters.
Which brings me back to the question that piece left unanswered. It documented how Israel’s standing in America has deteriorated, how the bipartisan consensus that protected Israel through ten presidencies has been eroded, how Antisemitism from both the left and the right has been emboldened by a political environment that Netanyahu helped create. The question it did not answer was: so what do we do about it? The answer, it turns out, begins in October. But it does not end there. And it is not only Israel’s answer to give.
There is a tendency in conversations like this one to treat the Israeli election as the hinge on which everything turns, to say: wait for October, and then we will see what is possible. I understand the instinct. But it is wrong in two important ways, and I want to address both of them before getting to the election itself.
Israelis are understandably focused on what October means for them domestically. The October 7 commission of inquiry that Netanyahu has spent two years blocking. The Haredi conscription crisis that finally broke the coalition when the ultra-Orthodox spiritual leader Rabbi Dov Lando declared he had lost trust in the Prime Minister and called him a liar. The cost of living, the housing crisis, the war’s economic toll. These are legitimate and urgent concerns and they will dominate the campaign.
But every allied government in the Western world, every American Jewish organization, every pro-Israel politician in Washington trying to defend the relationship against a tide of public opinion that has never been more hostile, is watching October with a specific and different question. Will Israel choose a government that understands what the last three years have cost? Will it choose leaders who grasp that Israel’s military achievements, and they are real, cannot be consolidated without the political and diplomatic infrastructure that Netanyahu has spent fifteen years dismantling? Will it, in short, choose to be a country that its friends can defend?
The electoral landscape is genuinely uncertain, which is itself a form of news after years in which Netanyahu’s grip on power seemed almost unbreakable. Most credible polls, from Channels 12, 13, and Kan, show Netanyahu’s coalition falling well short of the 61 seats needed to form a government, typically in the range of 49 to 53 seats. The opposition bloc, led by the newly formed Beyachad party of former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, polls at roughly 60 seats in most surveys, also short of a majority but consistently ahead of the coalition when Arab parties are excluded. The Channel 14 polls, run since June 2025 by a pollster with documented ties to Netanyahu, show a different picture, with the coalition at 64 to 66 seats. The honest answer is that nobody knows what October will produce, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either overconfident or has an agenda.
What we do know is this. Bennett and Lapid’s Beyachad has committed, if it forms a government, to establishing a state commission of inquiry into October 7, implementing a universal conscription law, imposing an eight-year term limit on the prime ministership, and advancing civil marriage including same-sex marriage. Bennett has described the new list as representing “the bloc of the entire Israeli nation” rather than any ideological camp. Whether that language survives contact with the coalition negotiations that would follow an election victory is a different question. Israeli politics has a way of consuming ambitious rhetoric. But the platform as stated represents a meaningful departure from the politics of the past three years, specifically on the questions that matter most to Israel’s international standing.
The Haredi conscription commitment is particularly significant for the American relationship, not because American politicians care deeply about Israeli internal religious politics, but because the exemption has become a symbol of a government that asks some of its citizens to bear all of the burden while others bear none. That symbol, amplified by the Kahanist statements and the settler vigilante violence and the death penalty law, has made it harder and harder for pro-Israel voices in America to make the case that Israel is a democracy that shares Western values. A government that implements universal conscription does not solve the bipartisan problem overnight. But it removes one of the most effective arguments that Israel’s critics use to suggest the country has fundamentally changed in character.
The more immediate question for the American relationship is what a Bennett-led government would do differently about Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and the ministers whose statements have appeared in ICJ briefs and been cited in allied government sanctions decisions. Bennett has given no guarantees on this. Israeli coalition politics does not permit it before an election, and in any case his own ideological positioning on settlements is not dramatically different from the current government’s. He is a settler himself and has historically supported annexation of parts of the West Bank. The idea that a Bennett government would be dramatically more moderate on Palestinian issues than a Netanyahu government is probably wishful thinking.
What would genuinely change, and this matters enormously for the American relationship, is the removal from power of Ben Gvir and Smotrich specifically, whose statements and conduct have been qualitatively more damaging than anything Bennett or Lapid have ever said. These are not consequences of Israeli policy in the abstract. They are consequences of specific individuals in specific roles. A government that does not include those individuals is, by definition, a government against which those specific arguments no longer apply. That is not nothing. In the current environment, it is actually quite a lot.
But the election is only part of the answer, and it would be a mistake to treat it as the whole of one. Some of the most damaging things happening right now do not require a change of government to stop. They require political will that the current government has chosen not to exercise.
Settler vigilante violence in the West Bank rose 27 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year, with severe incidents classified by the IDF and Shin Bet as terrorism rising by more than 50 percent. The prosecution rate for these crimes is not low. It is nearly nonexistent. Data collected by Yesh Din shows that between 2005 and 2025, 93.6 percent of investigation files opened by Israeli police into ideologically motivated crimes by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank were closed without indictment. Since 2022, not a single Israeli settler has been criminally convicted for the murder of a Palestinian civilian in the West Bank. Out of more than 1,500 Palestinian killings documented between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities opened 112 investigations and secured one conviction.
One. One conviction. In eight years.
I want to be very precise here, because this argument gets muddied constantly. Defending Israel’s right to exist, supporting its military operations against Hamas and Hezbollah, and opposing the kind of impunity I am describing are not contradictory positions. They are the same position held consistently. The settlers who rampage through Palestinian villages, burn cars, destroy olive trees, and occasionally kill people with near-zero legal consequence are not defending Israel. They are handing its enemies a legitimate grievance to amplify, undercutting every Israeli diplomat trying to make the case in Washington or Brussels or Canberra that Israel is a democracy that takes the rule of law seriously. They are making it harder, every single day, for people like me to defend Israel to people who are watching and asking questions.
This is also where lawlessness stops being only a Palestinian problem and becomes an Israeli one. A legal culture that tolerates vigilante violence against one population does not stay contained. The contempt for courts and democratic norms that animated the 2023 judicial overhaul, the threats against judges and prosecutors, the culture of impunity that allows a deputy Knesset speaker to praise Kahane from the podium without consequence, these are not separate phenomena. They are symptoms of the same disease. My Likud-voting friends who are uncomfortable with Ben Gvir and Smotrich but have told themselves it does not affect them should consider: a government that cannot or will not enforce the law against settlers in Hebron is building the same muscles it will eventually use against inconvenient citizens everywhere else.
None of this waits for October. Neither does what diaspora Jews decide to do right now, between now and the election, with their voices, their relationships, and their institutional power.
The JFNA’s March 2025 survey of more than 1,800 American Jews found something that on the surface looks alarming and on closer inspection is actually an opportunity. Only 37 percent of American Jews identify as Zionists, while 88 percent believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. The JFNA’s own chief impact officer called this “definition creep” shaped by political agendas, and she is right. The word “Zionism” has been so successfully weaponized, partly by Israel’s enemies and partly by the conduct of the Israeli government itself, that a majority of American Jews have disassociated from the label while retaining the underlying commitment. More than 70 percent feel emotionally attached to Israel. Nearly 70 percent say they sometimes find it hard to support the actions of Israel’s government. These two things are not in contradiction. They describe a community that loves Israel and is troubled by what is being done in its name, which is exactly the community that the solutions this piece is proposing need to reach.
The 43 percent of American Jewish millennials who told the AJC that Israel is not important to their Jewish identity are not lost. They are estranged. Estrangement is not the same as rejection and it responds to different things. You do not bring an estranged person back by lecturing them about their obligations or by demanding unconditional loyalty to a government whose conduct has alienated them. You bring them back by showing them something worth coming back to. A Judaism and an Israel that are honest about their failures and serious about their values is something worth coming back to. A hasbara operation that demands they pretend nothing is wrong is not.
This is where diaspora institutions, federations, campus organizations, synagogues, youth movements, the entire ecosystem of organized American Jewish life, need to make a choice that most of them have been avoiding. The choice is not between supporting Israel and criticizing its government. That is a false binary and everyone knows it. The choice is between engaging honestly with the estranged and losing them permanently to either indifference or active hostility. The community that shows up for honest conversation, that says we love Israel and we are troubled by the death penalty law and the settler violence and the treatment of Christian clergy and we are going to say so publicly, is the community that has a chance of keeping the 18 to 35 demographic in the tent. The community that demands silence and loyalty to the current government line is the community that will spend the next twenty years watching its most thoughtful young people walk out the door.
What does this actually look like in practice? It looks like Jewish federation boards that stop treating any criticism of Israeli government policy as an existential threat to communal unity and start treating honest disagreement as a sign of communal health. It looks like Birthright, the program that has introduced hundreds of thousands of young diaspora Jews to Israel, doing something it has historically struggled to do consistently: providing rigorous, honest Israel education that does not vary wildly depending on which trip provider or tour guide happens to be running that particular week. I staffed a dozen Birthright trips with two different providers. The educational quality ranged enormously. The infrastructure exists. What it needs is the institutional will to use it seriously. It looks like rabbis who are willing to say from the pulpit what most of their congregants are already thinking privately. It looks like every program seeking to foster young Jewish leadership doing what the ROI Community, founded with the Schusterman Foundation to invest in the next generation of Jewish leaders worldwide, has done at its best: building people who can hold complexity without falling apart, who can love Israel and demand better of it simultaneously, who can make the case for Zionism to their peers in language that does not sound like it was written in 1948. ROI is holding its last summit this summer after years of remarkable work. The need it filled does not disappear with it. Someone has to pick it up.
And it looks like the pro-Israel community in America finding ways, before October, to signal clearly to the Israeli political system that American Jewish engagement is not unconditional. The Israeli politicians who are currently calculating whether appealing to Ben Gvir’s base is worth the cost to their international standing should understand that the cost includes the erosion of the American Jewish community’s willingness to fight for them in Congress, on campus, and in the court of public opinion. That is not a small cost. That is an existential cost, paid slowly, in ways that will not be visible until it is too late to reverse them. The previous piece documented that erosion in detail. This piece is about stopping it.
In 2009, a young woman named Megan Phelps-Roper, one of the most prominent public voices of the Westboro Baptist Church, found a list published by JTA of the 100 most influential Jewish Twitter users. She created a fake account under the name Marissa Cohen and began following people on the list, hoping to find confirmation of WBC’s apocalyptic prophecies about Jews. Number two on that list was me.
She came to my Twitter feed looking for a fight. What she found instead was a conversation. Over months and then years, the tone shifted from attack to argument to something more like genuine exchange. When WBC protested a Jewlicious event in Los Angeles, she was there on the picket line and I went and talked to her, and I stood between her and the counter-protesters who were screaming at her. Eventually I pointed out an internal inconsistency in WBC’s doctrine that she later described as the first crack in her certainty. In 2012, she and her sister left the Westboro Baptist Church. She has since described that Twitter correspondence as “the beginning of this.” Her TED Talk on the experience has been viewed more than five million times. Of course, this is just one personal, albeit well-documented anecdote. However, it’s not the only example and I still believe it is instructive.
I tell this story not to take credit for someone else’s remarkable personal journey, but because it is the most concrete proof I have for the argument I am about to make. The argument is this: engagement works. It is slow, it is unglamorous, it requires patience with people who are saying things that make your blood boil, and it does not always succeed. But retreat never succeeds. Deplatforming never succeeds. Responding to hate with hate never succeeds. What works is sustained, honest, good-faith conversation that treats the person on the other side as a human being capable of changing their mind, because most of them are.
This is not a naive argument. It is a battle-tested one. And it is the argument that the pro-Israel community most urgently needs to internalize right now, because the online battlefield where young Americans are forming their views on Israel and on Jews looks nothing like the one we were fighting on in 2009, and the gap between what is happening there and what the pro-Israel community is doing about it is staggering.
A study by Cybersecurity for Democracy, conducted in partnership with New York University and Northeastern University and published ahead of the second anniversary of October 7, found that for every pro-Israel video posted on TikTok, roughly 17 pro-Palestinian videos appear on the platform. The ratio has remained consistent over two years. The study noted that pro-Israel content, when it exists at all, tends to exist within a community of already-convinced Jewish Zionists, consisting mainly of discussions of Antisemitism and short entertainment-oriented responses. In other words, the pro-Israel community is largely talking to itself, in a format that does not travel beyond people who are already on its side.
Meanwhile Hasan Piker, whose statements about Israel, Hamas, and Jews I documented at length in the previous piece, has three million Twitch followers. He streams for eight to ten hours a day. The platform where young American men are forming their political identities is not CNN. It is not the New York Times. It is Twitch and TikTok and YouTube, and the ratio of voices making the case against Israel to voices making the case for it on those platforms is not close.
There are some genuine bright spots. Holocaust survivors and educators have found real audiences on TikTok, with figures like the late Lily Ebert reaching millions before her death at age 100. Professor Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann of the Hebrew University has built a platform called Shoah Stories specifically to bring short-form Holocaust education into classrooms and informal settings. These are real and meaningful efforts. But they are drops in an ocean, and they are mostly about Holocaust memory rather than about the living, contested, complicated reality of Israel in 2026.
What is missing is not more content about the Holocaust, as important as that content is. What is missing is a generation of young, credible, culturally fluent voices who can make the case for Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself in the language and format that young Americans actually consume. Authentic voices who have rough edges, genuine uncertainty, and the willingness to say “I love Israel and I am troubled by what is happening in the West Bank and I am going to tell you why I still think it matters that Israel exists and thrives,” in thirty seconds on TikTok or three hours on a podcast.
The paid influencer campaign that Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ran through a Washington firm in 2025 has already demonstrated, at considerable cost, exactly what does not work. The campaign became public, the dollar figures got contested and amplified, and now every ordinary person trying to make a nuanced argument about Israel online gets met with accusations that their views were purchased rather than earned. The companies involved are apparently suing each other over unpaid bills. The whole operation managed to both fail at its stated goal and poison the well for every genuine organic pro-Israel voice in the process. It is a case study in how not to do this, and the lesson is not subtle: manufactured advocacy in an era of radical transparency does not just fail. It actively makes things worse.
The specific things the pro-Israel community needs to do on this front are not complicated to describe, even if they are hard to execute. Invest in authentic creators, not paid campaigns. Support the Jewish and Israeli voices who are already building audiences on these platforms and give them the resources to do it better, not by telling them what to say but by making it possible for them to keep doing what they are already doing. Create spaces for honest conversation rather than defensive talking points, because young people are extraordinarily good at detecting inauthenticity and they will reject polished hasbara every single time in favor of a messy genuine human conversation. And above all, do not retreat. The instinct to avoid hostile platforms, to stay where we are welcomed, to build communities of the already-convinced, is understandable and it is fatal. The Megan Phelps-Ropers of this generation are on TikTok. They are not going to come find us.
Which brings me to the deeper structural problem, the one that no amount of good content creation can solve on its own. Qatar is a peninsula slightly smaller than Connecticut, with a population of roughly three million people, fewer than 300,000 of whom are actually Qatari citizens. In 2025, it was the single largest foreign donor to American universities, providing more than $1.1 billion in a single year, more than China, more than the United Kingdom, more than any other country on earth. Since the US Department of Education began tracking this data, Qatar has given a total of $6.6 billion to American universities, with Cornell alone receiving nearly $2 billion directly, making Qatar Cornell’s largest foreign donor by a margin of thirty to one over the next largest.
Let that number sit for a moment. A country with the population of Chicago has spent more on shaping American higher education than China has, more than Britain has, more than any other nation on earth. And it has been doing this, according to Department of Education records, since 1981. The single largest year of Qatari giving was 2023, the year Hamas launched the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza began.
The previous piece documented how this money translates into political influence, the Tucker Carlson FARA filings, the Lumen8 operation, the $180,000 a month paid to penetrate conservative American media. But the university funding is the deeper and more durable investment, because it does not buy today’s headlines. It buys tomorrow’s professors, journalists, diplomats, and politicians. A generation of American students educated in institutions where anti-Zionist postcolonial frameworks are the ambient intellectual water, has grown into the generation now running newsrooms, congressional staffs, and State Department offices. Qatar did not create the intellectual frameworks. It funded the institutions that made them dominant. There are, of course, multiple forces at play here, from domestic political movements, generational shifts, postcolonial theory’s independent academic trajectory etc. but $6.6 billion dollars, let’s just say that that can buy a lot of momentum.
Now ask yourself: what has the pro-Israel community invested in American universities over the same period, at comparable scale, to build counter-narrative infrastructure? The honest answer is almost nothing. There are individual donors. There are Hillel chapters on campuses, doing important work with inadequate resources. There are some academic centers and think tanks. But there is no systematic, multi-decade, billion-dollar investment to match it, nothing that shapes how a generation thinks the way Qatar’s endowments have shaped how a generation thinks. The pro-Israel community has been funding press releases while Qatar has been funding professors.
This is not a criticism for its own sake. It is a description of a structural problem that has a structural solution, and the solution begins with being honest about the scale of the gap. You cannot close a forty-year, multi-billion-dollar head start with a media campaign or a social media strategy. You close it by making comparable long-term investments in the institutions that shape intellectual culture: universities, think tanks, curricula, fellowships, academic journals, and the patient, unglamorous work of producing scholars who can compete in the intellectual arena where the battle over Israel’s legitimacy is actually being fought.
There is a model for what this looks like, and I have seen it work up close. The Muslim Jewish Conference, which I worked with as a staff member, brings together young Muslims and Jews from across the world, including from countries with no diplomatic relations with Israel, for a week of sustained, honest, structured dialogue. Its tagline is “we talk to each other, not about each other.” What happens in those rooms is not comfortable. It is not a feel-good exercise in pretending the conflict does not exist. It is genuine engagement between people who hold fundamentally different views, built on the recognition that mutual understanding is not the same as agreement, and that the alternative to dialogue is not neutrality. It is the consolidation of hostility on both sides.
The MJC model works because it invests in relationships rather than arguments. The person who spent a week genuinely engaging with the Jewish perspective on Israel is not going to go home and lead a campus divestment campaign with the same uncomplicated certainty they arrived with. They may not become a Zionist. They may never agree with Israeli policy. But they will have encountered the human reality of the Jewish connection to Israel in a way that a protest sign or a social media algorithm cannot replicate. And the Jewish participant who spent a week genuinely listening to Muslim perspectives on the conflict will be a more credible and more effective advocate for Israel, not a less effective one, because they will understand the argument they are actually up against rather than the strawman version they have been rehearsing.
This is not naive. It is the most hardheaded strategic argument available, because the alternative, building ever-higher walls between communities and letting each side’s most extreme voices define the conversation, is producing exactly the environment we are now living in. A 17 to 1 ratio of anti-Israel to pro-Israel content on TikTok is not a natural fact. It is the result of specific choices made by specific people over specific decades. It can be changed by different choices made by different people starting now.
The diaspora organizations, federations, philanthropists, and pro-Israel institutions that are serious about reversing the trajectory documented in the previous piece need to make a choice about where they invest their resources. The choice is between continuing to fund the infrastructure of crisis response, press releases, rapid response teams, social media monitoring, and reactive advocacy, or beginning to fund the infrastructure of long-term cultural change, academic institutions, interfaith dialogue organizations, Jewish education pipelines, and the patient multi-decade investment in the intellectual and cultural environment where Israel’s legitimacy is either built or destroyed. Both are necessary. But the ratio of investment between them is wildly out of proportion to the scale of the problem. And until it changes, the trajectory will not change either.
I started this piece in the Mahane Yehuda market, watching people who have almost nothing in common share a city and a country and, whether they know it or not, a fate. I want to end it there too, because that image is the argument, compressed into a single frame.
The Kurdish vendor and the Haredi family and the Ethiopian soldiers and the secular couple from the German Colony are not going to agree on how to govern Israel. They are not going to agree on religion and state, on the West Bank, on the Haredim and the army, on who owns Jerusalem or what it is supposed to become. These disagreements are real and they matter and they will not be wished away by any amount of communal unity rhetoric. But they are all, every single one of them, dependent on the same thing: an Israel that is strong enough, legitimate enough, and diplomatically supported enough to continue existing and to give them the space to have those disagreements. And that Israel, the one strong enough and legitimate enough to survive, requires the American relationship that the previous piece documented is in serious trouble.
October changes nothing by itself. A Bennett government, if that is what October produces, does not automatically restore the bipartisan consensus that fifteen years of Netanyahu’s choices eroded. It does not instantly win back the 18 to 35 American Jewish demographic that has been drifting away from Israel for a decade. It does not close the 17 to 1 ratio on TikTok or reverse forty years of Qatari investment in American universities or make Tucker Carlson stop claiming that Chabad is orchestrating wars to rebuild the Temple. These are deep problems with long timelines. They will require patient, sustained solutions measured in decades, not election cycles.
What October can do, if Israelis choose wisely, is stop the bleeding. Remove from positions of power the specific individuals whose specific statements have handed Israel’s enemies their most effective ammunition. Signal to allied governments, to the American Jewish mainstream, to the pro-Israel Democrats and moderate Republicans who have been desperately looking for a reason to stay on Israel’s side, that Israel has heard the alarm and chosen differently. That is not everything. But it is the precondition for everything else. You cannot rebuild a house while someone is still setting fire to it.
The diaspora’s role in all of this is not to wait and see what October produces and then decide whether Israel deserves its support. That is the transactional model and it has never been the Jewish model. A covenant works differently. It says that the obligation runs in both directions regardless of whether the other party is currently fulfilling theirs, and that the diaspora’s job right now is to make clear, loudly and specifically and through every channel available, that it is watching, that it cares, that it has opinions about what kind of Israel it wants to defend, and that those opinions are going to shape how hard it fights. Not silence. Not unconditional loyalty to whoever happens to be in power in Jerusalem. Engaged, demanding, loving pressure from people who have skin in the game and are not going to pretend otherwise.
The previous piece ended by saying the bill is coming due. The bill is still coming due. But walking through the shuk with my kids last week, watching this city do what it always does, hold the sacred and the profane in the same breath, I found myself thinking something I did not expect to think. I found myself thinking that this country, this impossible, magnificent, maddening country, has survived things that would have destroyed any other nation on earth. It has survived them not because it was perfect but because enough people loved it seriously enough to demand that it be better than it was. That is what loving Israel actually requires. Not flags and slogans. Not silence in the face of things that should not be silent about. Not the comfortable pretense that everything is fine when everything is clearly not fine. But the hard, specific, unglamorous work of people who refuse to give up on something worth fighting for.
October is coming. The work begins now.
This is the second in a series of pieces on Israel’s relationship with the diaspora and the United States. The first piece, Is Israel Losing America? Thanks Bibi., was published last month.
