Israel’s Theocratic Turn and the Fracture in American Jewish Ties

The choices Israel makes today will decide how American Jews define their tomorrow

Like many American Jews, I move between the terror of October 7, which punctured Israel’s sense of security and Jewish self-understanding across world Jewry, and the unending killing of Palestinian civilians in Netanyahu’s IDF-directed response in Gaza. This campaign, meant to compensate for the government’s failure to prevent Hamas’s incursion, has become a brutal bid for political survival.

I do not see how such actions bring the hostages home. Why would Hamas return them all? It is not in their self-interest in what is now its fight to survive. Meanwhile the war itself is generating endless new recruits for its ranks. Netanyahu and his coalition have likely concluded that most hostages will not return. News out of Israel is clear about this. He should never have been entrusted to lead Israel in this war. Israel’s overwhelming protest movement against this government underlines this as does the reversal of global sympathy, from solidarity with Israel after October 7 to a disturbing leniency toward Hamas, a disastrous outcome of his leadership.

This dialectic between October 7 and its aftermath has left American Jewry spinning. Our communities are deeply divided over Gaza. The horror of civilian deaths has fractured solidarity, and Israeli critics of the war dominate American media and discourse.

Figures like Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and American journalist Peter Beinart argue that Israel is becoming a theocratic authoritarian state. Harari collapses Judaism into the Israeli state itself, calling its future “authoritarian Judaism.” For many American Jews, this is disorienting. Our pride is bound up with liberal democracy, with Jewish contributions to social justice movements: Clara Lemlich in labor, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner in civil rights, Harvey Milk in gay rights, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem in women’s rights, Julius Lester bridging black Jewish relations and more. Jews have long fought for democracy and for the vulnerable, not against them. Now we face an Israel increasingly out of step with those values.

For most American Jews, Israel was a political miracle. The guiding mantra is “land for peace,” which carries its own political logic. From religious and revisionist Zionist perspectives, that logic undermines sacred narratives by ceding biblical land — Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. Today, Israel’s shift from presenting itself as a political state to claiming divine entitlement to land creates profound challenges for American Jews.

Harari argues that liberal Jews who will soon insist Israel does not reflect “real” Judaism are as irrelevant as communists in 1950s Berlin who denied Stalin’s Marxism. Like many Israelis, he assumes Judaism begins and ends with Israel. It does not. American Jewry, numbering between 5.7 and 7.5 million, has long been a modern miracle in its own right. Yet Israelis have often treated American Jews as Judaically inferior, and too often, we have internalized that view. It is time to recognize American Judaism as a proud, independent entity with a voice of its own.

Beinart, a cultural Zionist, denies Israel’s legitimacy as a state. He has always written in stark terms, earnest and self-righteous but compelling. Ironically, in declaring that Israel cannot endure, he proves its endurance. He may despise it, but Israel exists. To speak a nation of citizens into nonexistence is no different than what he accuses Israel of doing to Palestinians.

Beinart is right, however, to condemn Israel’s 58 year subjugation of Palestinians and its refusal to allow self-determination through a two-state solution. The government’s drive to annex the West Bank, and the indifference of many Israeli Jews, is undeniable. Yet to argue that Israel should not exist because of these crimes is fantasy. Israel’s strength is rooted in its history of insecurity: they and the Jews from whom they descend have never known a fair, just world.

Israeli Jews know they are unwanted. Consider that Israeli university faculty are uniquely boycotted worldwide, even by the American Association of University Professors. Why only Israel? The United States has dropped more bombs in the last seven months than in the previous four years, yet few critics can say where or why. The singling out of Israel is a form of antisemitism. Israel is, of course, deserving of being held accountable for terrorizing policies and behavior. However, only fantasy living fools deny Jew-hatred is absent from many criticisms of it. It is real, pernicious, and on the rise.

How to respond to that fact divides American and Israeli perspectives. American Jews see “never again” as a universal demand: no group should endure what we endured. Israelis, by contrast, see antisemitism as permanent. For them, “never again” means that if someone must die, it will not be Jews. As Dara Horn put it, “The World Loves Dead Jews.”

Israeli experience cannot but be informed by two thousand years of existential Christian hatred, not to mention the 1,400 years of Middle East Muslims’ subordination of  Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews to second class citizenry in between Jew hating murderous episodes. How can anyone be surprised that Israel will do whatever is necessary, however ugly, to deny the world what it loves.

But does survival require the subjugation of Palestinians? Israel has occupied them, without accountability, since 1967. Has this made Israel more secure? Netanyahu destroyed the pretense of a two-state solution by funding Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority, then declaring, “We can’t negotiate with Hamas.” True enough, but no one can negotiate with the current Likud-led coalition either.

No Israeli government today is prepared to pursue two states. The only political forces capable of defeating Netanyahu are Religious Zionists and their allies, who, like the Revisionists before them, have no intention of seeking peace. Their leader, Naftali Bennett, has openly declared Hebron’s sacred primacy over Tel Aviv’s secular identity.

Months ago, in “The New York Times,” Beinart argued that American Jews will soon have to choose between their liberal values and their commitment to Israel. Perhaps this is hyperbolic, but I am not convinced he is wrong. People often live with contradictions Beinart cannot abide. Still, he may be prophetic: a reckoning may be coming for Jewish America’s relationship with Israel.

The question is unavoidable: Does Israel’s growing theocratic orthodoxy threaten the solidarity American Jews have long assumed to be natural? The answer will shape the future of Jewish identity in America.