(The political journalist Sol Stern, who started on the left and moved to the right and ended up a liberal, died on July 11, 2025 at the age of 89. He left this essay unfinished when he died.)
As a journalist I have written about Israel and the many threats to its survival for more than half a century, beginning in 1973 when I covered the Yom Kippur war for the New York Times. Along the way I became an Israeli citizen and a Zionist. I now spend several months every year living in my favorite country.
Based on what I saw and heard during my two most recent visits I have an urgent message for my fellow American Zionists and supporters of Israel. Although the threat to Israel’s security from its Islamist neighbors remains very serious, the greatest long-term danger to the Jewish state’s survival now comes from within. The main reason is that for the first time in its turbulent history Israel is led by a government that is not Zionist. To put this astonishing political development more precisely, a near majority of the members of the governing coalition are either openly anti-Zionist or reject the fundamental principles of modern political Zionism enumerated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
To understand this sad tale, let us begin with the raw numbers. The Netanyahu coalition established its new government in November, 2022, with a majority of 64 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. The Likud party possessed thirty-four Knesset seats, two ultra-Orthodox or “Haredi” parties added a total of seventeen seats, and two religious settler parties added fourteen more. Plus, several members of the Knesset’s Likud bloc are ideologically close to the settler parties and support their goal of reclaiming all of the biblical lands, including Gaza. (Two years after the installation of the Netanyahu government, it was joined by a small breakaway party from Likud, but this didn’t affect the extreme ideological shift I am describing.)
The giants of the twentieth-century Zionist revolution — from Theodore Herzl to Ze’ev Jabotinsky to David Ben Gurion to Menachem Begin — believed that the creation of a modern, democratic Jewish state after two millennia of exile would normalize the Jewish people by making them again a nation “among the nations.” That hope was reaffirmed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which invoked “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations in their own sovereign state.”
The Declaration offered this solemn promise: “The State of Israel . . . will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality and social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
There was a time when Benjamin Netanyahu vigorously defended the same bedrock Zionist principles. In 1993, after ending his term as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Netanyahu published a well-researched historical volume arguing the moral case for the existence of a Jewish state. The book’s title was “A Place Among the Nations.” Unfortunately, the religious parties in Netanyahu’s government care very little about being a nation “among the nations.” And now Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care that his coalition partners are determined to set Israel very far apart from the nations.
The rabbinical leaders of the two ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition do not even care about being part of the Israeli nation. Their young men and women are instructed from birth to accept that they will live their lives in a hermetic community of unwavering faith, forever separated from their fellow Israeli citizens. That includes their adamant refusal to serve in the country’s military in any capacity.
In May 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the government must finally begin drafting the Haredim. If anyone still doubted the ultra-Orthodox leadership’s utter contempt for the Zionist project, Israel’s chief Sephardic Rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, made it abundantly clear in an authoritative statement to his flock prompted by the high court’s ruling. “The state exists on Torah study, and without the Torah, there would have been no success for the army,” said the learned rabbi. He also warned that “if they force us to join the army, we will all move abroad.”
Refusing military service is a conscious political and ideological choice by Israel’s rabbinical leaders. It is not a matter of biblical law and is often debunked by other biblical scholars. The well-known Orthodox rabbi and teacher Rabbi Ilai Ofran responded caustically to Chief Rabbi Yosef’s claim that studying Torah protects the people of Israel. “I for one do not believe it at all,” he wrote. “To be honest, this is a fairly new ultra-Orthodox rant that was created in response to complaints about the shameful ultra-Orthodox draft evasion, to create the impression that they, too, are bearing some sort of burden for the country. It is almost impossible to find sources for this opinion in ancient literature.”
This is no small matter. The damage to Israel’s security caused by Haredi draft-dodging may be illustrated by another set of numbers. Israel’s population is just short of ten million, but Arabs make up twenty-one percent of that total and ultra-Orthodox Jews constitute another fourteen percent. Since almost all Arabs and Haredi Jews do not serve in the IDF, the actual manpower pool available for the country’s overstressed military is only six and a half million million people. That means the burden carried by secular Israeli Jews and mainstream orthodox Israeli Jews is disproportionately large and growing larger each year.
So far, during the Gaza hostilities, 350,000 reservists have been called up for duty, some for stretches of two hundred or more days. Security analysts have warned that the IDF is stretched to a near-breaking point. In response, the Knesset passed a law extending the period of service for new eighteen-year-old recruits from thirty-two months to thirty-six months and raised the age that reservists can legally be called back to duty from forty to forty-one. Despite these changes, representatives of the IDF recently told a Knesset committee that its ranks are still short by twelve thousand soldiers.Adding insult to injury, the families of the soldiers who will now be required to serve for even longer periods are also paying higher taxes to subsidize the Haredi draft-dodgers while they spend their years studying Torah.
Jewish Power and Religious Zionism are the names of the two messianic settler parties in the governing coalition. Unlike the Haredim, draft-dodging has never been an issue for radical settlers. The Orthodox young men from the settlements embrace military service and many volunteer at disproportionate rates for the IDF’s elite combat units, (Orthodox women, unlike their secular sisters, are exempt from the draft.) Unfortunately, the settler soldiers are educated by their community’s leaders and prominent rabbis to disdain the democratic and liberal values at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. The main idea they are taught instead is the primacy of the ancient commandments requiring settlement and redemption of all the God-given biblical lands of Israel, including the Gaza strip. Of course, a majority of the half million Israelis who currently live on the West Bank are not religious messianists. The first settlements were actually established after the 1967 war by the ruling Labor party. Yet from those early days the spiritual leaders of the radical settler movement rejected the values of the Zionist founders.
As the declaration makes clear, the heart of political Zionism has always been national self-determination in a rights-based democratic state. The messianic religious radicals who launched some of the new settlements on the West Bank in the decades after the Six Day War had another idea about the meaning of Zionism, which eventually turned into a nearly complete negation of the founders’ Zionism. Their idea was the ancient commandment that settlement and redemption of the land of Israel takes precedence over all other values, including democracy and individual rights.
In the book, The Settlers and The Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (1997), the Israeli historian Gadi Taub (who has since become a Netanyahu apologist) provides an excellent account of how the early leaders of the settlement project rejected the Zionist principles of the Declaration. Here are a few of their counter-principles:
Hanan Porat, one of the founders of Gush Emunim, the first of the settler organizations, declared: “The commandment to settle the land takes precedence over the value of individual life.” Rabbi Shlomo Zavner, head of the Yeshiva Atteret Cohanim, announced that “settlement stands above moral-human considerations.” The most revered of the early prophets of settlement, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, proudly proclaimed that “we are commanded by the Torah, not the government.”
The events of October 7 were devastating for all Israelis. But the war against Hamas soon came to be seen as a golden opportunity for the settlers and their political parties. On January 28, 2024, thousands of radical settlers and their supporters converged in Jerusalem for a one-day celebration. The event was called the “Conference for the Victory of Israel – Settlement Brings Security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria.” (Northern Samaria means southern Lebanon.) At the time, over a hundred hostages were languishing in Hamas’ tunnels and IDF soldiers were dying trying to rescue them. But the activists of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party danced and sang in the holy city about the Torah’s prophecies and the coming resettlement of Gaza.
Eleven cabinet ministers participated in the conclave, including two from Netanyahu’s Likud, plus another sixteen Knesset members. The two biggest stars were National Security Minister Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich. In his speech, Ben Gvir declared: “If we don’t want another October 7, we need to go back home and control [Gaza]. We need to find a legal way to voluntarily emigrate [Palestinians] and impose death sentences on terrorists. I turn to you, Prime Minister Netanyahu: this is the time for brave decisions.”
Smotrich spoke of the children who were evacuated from Jewish settlements in Gaza when Israel disengaged from the strip in 2005. He said that after victory in this war those children must return. “We are rising, we have a nation of lions, and many children are returning there as combat fighters,” Smotrich proclaimed. “We must make sure they return there as settlers to protect the people of Israel.” Not to be outdone, Haim Katz, a Likud member and the Minister of Tourism, proclaimed; “Today, eighteen years later [from the Gaza disengagement], we have the opportunity to rebuild and expand the land of Israel. This is our final opportunity.”. On the morning after Israel’s Independence Day in 2024, Ben Gvir, who is also in charge of the nation’s police force, led a “March to Gaza” that drew thousands of his radical followers. When they reached the Gaza border, the cabinet minister addressed the jubilant crowd and said, “We must return to Gaza now. We are coming home to the Holy Land.”
Returning to Gaza is not the only Torah-inspired project that the messianic settlers are pursuing. There is also the dream of pushing out the Moslem usurpers and their Al Aqsa Mosque from the Temple Mount and ultimately building the third temple in its place. Ben Gvir has led groups of his followers to prostrate themselves in prayer near the Al Aqsa Mosque, a violation of Israel’s long-term understanding with the Kingdom of Jordan, the officially designated caretaker of the Muslim holy sites. He also advocates building a synagogue on the site.
Itamar Ben Gvir’s holy march to Gaza and his provocative forays to the Temple Mount are a fulfillment of Rabbi Kook’s admonition to the settler leaders to ignore the laws of the state and instead follow the commandments of the Torah. This is one of the reasons that in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government the pragmatic political Zionism of Israel’s founders has left the building.
Owing to the absurd political alignment in the government, the classical Zionists and the most productive people in the country are being squeezed as in a steel vice. On one side of the vice are the messianic settlers pushing relentlessly for more war: a war in Gaza to reclaim the biblical lands; a war in Southern Lebanon, which is Northern Samaria on the biblical map; and enough military force as is needed to finally annex Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank. On the other side of that vice are the Haredim, who now make up eighteen percent of Israel’s population and within a generation will grow to thirty percent of the Jewish population but will not contribute in any way to Israel’s war effort or to its economy.
Zionism is in the streets…..