Happy 250th, America! With love, from your sister democracy

Two hundred and fifty years is a long time in the life of a democracy.

It is long enough for founding promises to be tested, challenged, renewed and argued over by generation after generation. Long enough for ideals to confront the realities of division, inequality, ambition, fear and even war. Long enough for citizens to discover that democracy will not necessarily survive on the strength of its brilliant design. It survives because people keep choosing it over far worse alternatives.

This July 4, as Americans celebrate 250 years of independence, Israelis have reason to look across the ocean with gratitude and admiration. The United States has been the State of Israel’s indispensable ally for more than half a century, building up our strength, standing with us in war when necessary, and opening doors to peace when possible. The relationship between our two countries is sometimes described as “strategic,” and rightly so. In our dangerous neighborhood, alliances matter.

But the relationship runs deeper.

The founding of the United States launched a revolutionary democratic experiment whose influence reached far beyond its borders. The principles of freedom, equality, self-government, rule of law, and the separation of powers inspired constitutional democracies around the world, including the rebirth of the modern State of Israel. Those shared principles have always been the true core of the American-Israeli alliance.

Israelis are ever-conscious of the essential nature of America’s support. That was true in 1948, when Harry Truman decided against the advice of his foreign policy establishment to recognize the fledgling State of Israel. It was true on October 7, when Joe Biden responded to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust with compassion, support and a much-appreciated presidential visit. And it was true in  October 2025 and in January 2026, when Donald Trump helped bring an end to the agonizing hostage crisis and brought our loved ones home from captivity in Gaza – first the living and then the fallen. Israelis are grateful for all this and more. 

But gratitude alone will not secure the future of our most important alliance.

As signs multiply that American public opinion is turning away from the Jewish state, Israelis must launch a serious effort to salvage the relationship. Some of the factors that are driving this shift have little to do with Israel and require American soul-searching. But if Israelis take a long, hard look in the mirror, they will see that they have work to do to shore up the shared values that link the project of 1776 to that of 1948. Indeed, Israel must tend to the democratic foundations that made this partnership so natural in the first place.

That task is urgent.

The past few years have exposed deep divisions in Israeli society over these very questions. Before the war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis filled the streets in response to the government’s proposed judicial reforms, which they interpreted as an attempt to curtail judicial independence and concentrate power in the executive branch. Even many who disapproved of the protest movement understood that the argument was about something larger than any single reform. It was about the very fundamentals of our democracy: the mechanisms for the distribution of power, the checks and balances in our system, the guarantees of our individual rights, and the balance between the Jewish and democratic components of our national identity.

Remarkably, that debate has continued, after a brief pause in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, throughout the longest war in Israel’s history. 

Israel undoubtedly needs a strong army. But military strength alone cannot sustain the country. Israel also needs broad public confidence in the country’s leadership, its governing institutions, and national purpose.

In a way, the tragedy of October 7 created a historic opportunity to revisit some of the unresolved questions that attended Israel’s founding. Israel is famously one of the only democracies in the world without a constitution or a bill of rights. It is time to complete that unfinished work.

A new constitutional arrangement would afford Israelis the opportunity to redesign the balance of power among the three branches of government, to define the rules of the game to help prevent future constitutional crises, to guarantee their rights, and to build that a broader consensus around a reimagined vision of Israeli democracy. These things are not “nice to have”—they are the very things that allow a democracy to ask so much of its people. And they also happen to be the very things that tie Israel to its greatest ally.

America’s constitutional order was not completed in 1776. It took 13 years – and no small measure of conflict and compromise – to move from the Declaration of Independence to a constitutional framework capable of holding together a large and diverse republic. Seventy-eight years after Israel’s own Declaration of Independence, we too must complete this essential piece of our national architecture.

America’s 250th birthday should therefore be a moment not only of gratitude, but also of self-examination. It should be an opportunity to celebrate our closest ally while recommitting ourselves to the founding ideals that have long united our two democracies.

So, yes, on this historic Fourth of July, we say to America: happy birthday, and thank you.

Thank you for helping make the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel possible. Thank you for inspiring us through your enduring commitment to freedom. And thank you for reminding us of the hard work that still lies ahead of us.