The Blogs: Israel Needs a Left

The Left’s purpose extends far beyond peace. Israel still needs a movement for ordinary life.

I have spent several essays telling the Israeli Left that our peace policies failed. This one contains good news: the Left has always had a much larger purpose.

For years, the Israeli Left has acted as though history assigned it a single portfolio: the Palestinians. We had a diplomatic program, a moral vocabulary and a map. When Israelis stopped trusting the program, we kept offering the vocabulary and pointing to the map. Then we wondered why the electorate treated us as irrelevant, naive or both.

History created that distrust. The Second Intifada happened. The withdrawal from Gaza happened. October 7 happened.

Palestinian humanity remains real. So do settlement expansion and the damage Benjamin Netanyahu has done. Experience now demands a revision of our hopes. A political camp that cannot revise its beliefs in response to reality becomes a secular religion built around dogma.

The Left’s premature obituary

When I publish arguments like these, I increasingly hear – notably from Israelis – that the Left no longer exists in Israel, and therefore essays addressed to it are irrelevant. This is a strange objection. If the Left is dead, then a postmortem and a reconstruction plan are urgently relevant. If it is merely weak, its weakness is the subject. The functions it once performed still demand a political home.

The Demokratim complicate that obituary, and they deserve credit for trying. They have brought Labor and Meretz into a common Zionist, social-democratic home. Under Yair Golan – a former deputy chief of staff who physically went south to rescue civilians on October 7 – they are refusing to concede patriotism, security or Zionism to the Right. They are building a party, holding primaries, recruiting organizers and attempting to turn the democracy protest movement into a governing force. That is serious work. I want them to succeed.

The Demokratim already have a social and economic program. The question is whether ordinary Israelis experience that program as the party’s central promise, can describe it from memory, and see the party organizing relentlessly around the material pressures of their lives. A merger is an achievement. The mass movement remains to be built. Trying deserves praise; succeeding will require more.

Politics becomes breakfast, medicine and sleep

Israelis still have to pay rent. They still have to buy groceries. They still have to get to work, find childcare, care for aging parents, survive understaffed hospitals, send children into overcrowded classrooms and somehow imagine that those children might one day afford homes of their own. A country can survive an enemy and still become unlivable for its citizens.

The grievance is measurable. The OECD’s 2025 Economic Survey of Israel found that Israel had among the highest comparative price levels in the OECD even though its GDP per person remained below the OECD average. Food, housing and transportation consume much of lower-income households’ resources. The OECD also pointed to weak competition, trade barriers and regulation that protects prices more reliably than it protects consumers.

The National Insurance Institute’s 2024 Poverty Report found that 27.8 percent of Israeli households were unable to cover all their expenses. Nine percent reported forgoing medical care because of cost. Those figures describe a society failing at the level where politics becomes breakfast, medicine and sleep.

This is where a Left is supposed to live.

Remember what labor was for

I despise much of what the Democratic Socialists of America has become, especially its anti-Zionist politics and its willingness to turn Jews into abstractions inside somebody else’s revolutionary morality play. The DSA nevertheless understands one elementary fact that the Israeli Left seems to have forgotten: people who cannot afford ordinary life are politically available. The DSA is capitalizing – yes, capitalizing – on rent, debt, medical bills, insecure work and the conviction that an economy ostensibly organized for everyone somehow serves almost no one.

Leave the DSA’s hatreds with the DSA. Remember why labor movements existed before graduate seminars taught everyone to speak in denunciations. The Left once organized people around work, wages, housing, schools, healthcare and mutual responsibility. It built institutions with its own hands.

Israel’s own Labor tradition accumulated real sins. Mapai became an establishment. The Histadrut became a bureaucracy and sometimes a machine. Mizrahi Israelis, Arab Israelis and others had excellent reasons to resent the condescension and exclusion of the old elite. Any honest reconstruction must begin with that history.

That flawed tradition also understood something fundamental: Zionism meant the practical construction of a society. Building homes was Zionism. Protecting workers was Zionism. Establishing clinics, schools, farms, transit and systems of mutual aid was Zionism. Defending the country and making it worth living in belonged to the same mission.

A program sitting in plain sight

Build housing where people can actually live and connect it to jobs with functional public transportation. Expand the supply of homes and ensure that residents share the gains now captured by developers and landowners. Give renters stability. Treat childcare as economic infrastructure. Restore public medicine and education before their exhaustion becomes irreversible. Strengthen collective bargaining while making unions answerable to the workers they claim to represent. Bring security to contract workers, caregivers and the people who clean, deliver, build and teach.

Break monopolies and cartels. Reduce trade barriers that exist mainly to shelter incumbents. A modern Left should challenge private concentrations of power and use competition in the public interest. Markets are useful servants and vicious masters. Use them where they lower prices; regulate them where they extract rents; replace them with public provision where human dignity requires universality.

Fight corruption and political patronage as economic as well as constitutional issues. Every crony appointment, sham tender and ministry handed out as coalition loot eventually appears in somebody’s taxes, commute, classroom or hospital corridor. State capacity is the machinery through which democratic promises become material facts.

And stop talking as though economic politics can wait until the conflict is solved. The conflict may remain unsolved for years. That prospect increases the urgency of organizing life inside Israel.

Yes, the Left still needs a security doctrine. It must say how Israel will defeat immediate threats, deter regional enemies, prevent another October 7 and pursue political arrangements as real opportunities emerge. Prospective partners must be judged by their actions. Israelis require a movement comfortable with Jewish power and unequivocally committed to Jewish survival.

Security is the floor

A country must build upward from security.

The Right has spent years persuading Israelis that only existential questions are real. That is politically convenient. A voter contemplating Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah may postpone asking why a salary cannot buy an apartment, why a grocery cart feels like a luxury purchase, or why public systems demand private workarounds from anyone who can afford them.

The Left should ask those questions every day, in the language of ordinary life. It should organize tenants, workers, parents, reservists, small-business owners and communities outside the Tel Aviv cultural center. It should listen to Mizrahi and religious voters as political equals. It should serve Arab citizens as a full constituency with diverse interests. It should offer Haredi citizens a route into shared civic and economic responsibility that combines common obligations with respect for their way of life.

This would require humility, which is unpleasant, and conflict with entrenched interests, which is politics. It would also require the Left to become legible again.

Voters should be able to describe its purpose in one sentence:

We will protect the country, and we will make it possible to live in it.

Political adulthood requires pursuing a future in which Israelis are secure and Palestinians can govern their own lives. Human equality remains a principle. Jewish self-determination remains a principle. Palestinian lives, rights and national aspirations remain morally real. Particular borders, diplomatic formulas and predictions about other people’s intentions are hypotheses. When hypotheses fail, adults revise them and continue working from their values.

Stop accepting your obituary

The Israeli Left can remain fully itself while developing a complete political program. Defending the courts matters. Opposing Netanyahu matters. Ending messianic settlement politics matters. A complete program also tells a family how it will pay next month’s bills.

So, comrades: stop accepting your own obituary. Rise from the ashes.

Organize. Build. Govern.

Quit the self-pity and get your house in order.

Israel needs a Left. Israel needs you.