The Future of a Jewish and Democratic Israel Requires Everyone at the Table

After the October 27 elections, I hope Israeli political leaders will do something that still seems radical to many of them: they will consider Arab parties—particularly Ra’am—as legitimate potential partners in forming the next government of Israel.

Not as a favor.

Not as an act of desperation.

Not as a temporary political expedient.

But because this is what a democratic state is supposed to do.

The future of a Jewish and democratic Israel depends on all its citizens—whether Jewish or not—having a genuine voice in the affairs of the state.

That proposition should not be particularly controversial. And yet, in Israel today, it remains so.

The recent attempt to prevent Arab parties from participating in the October 27 elections makes the point painfully clear. The Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify both the Joint List and Ra’am. That decision was not merely politically troubling. It was fundamentally at odds with the democratic principles Israel claims to defend.

Thankfully, Israel’s Supreme Court corrected the mistake.

On October 2, an expanded panel of the Court unanimously overturned the Central Elections Committee’s disqualification of both the Joint List and Ra’am, finding that the evidence did not meet the legal standard required to prevent them from participating in the election.

That unanimous ruling matters.

It matters because the Central Elections Committee is a political body. The Supreme Court, in this instance, acted as the constitutional backstop that it is supposed to be: protecting the political process from the temptation of political actors to exclude their opponents.

And the temptation to exclude is powerful.

It is especially powerful when the people being excluded are a minority.

What would Herzl say?

I have spent considerable time in my own writing wrestling with Theodor Herzl and what his vision of a Jewish state actually requires of us.

Herzl was unambiguous about the question of religious and national difference.

In The Jewish State, he wrote that if people of other creeds and nationalities came to live in the Jewish state, they should receive “honorable protection and equality before the law.”

That was not an incidental thought.

It was part of Herzl’s conception of the society he was trying to build.

A Jewish state, in Herzl’s vision, was not supposed to be a state in which Jews exercised political power by denying the humanity, dignity, or political rights of everyone else. Jewish sovereignty was supposed to provide a secure home for the Jewish people while creating a modern society governed by law.

That distinction matters enormously today.

Israel can—and I believe should—remain a Jewish state.

But being a Jewish state cannot mean that Jewish citizens are the only citizens whose political aspirations are legitimate.  Nor does it mean that Jews have greater rights than non-Jews.

And this is where Kaplan becomes important.

My own engagement with Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement of Judaism to which I belong, has pushed me even further on this question.

Kaplan understood Judaism not as a frozen set of propositions but as an evolving civilization. He also understood democracy as something considerably deeper than a mechanism for counting votes.

For Kaplan, pluralism was not simply a political technique. It was a condition of a healthy democratic society.

He challenged Jewish nationalism precisely because he worried about what happens when national survival becomes an end in itself rather than a means toward creating a society worthy of survival.

That is why Kaplan’s Zionism was so different from the nationalism that eventually became dominant.

In 1955, in A New Zionism, Kaplan wrote that Israel would ultimately need to become an “Israeli State,” rather than understanding itself simply as a state belonging politically to Jews.

And in 1949, the Reconstructionist movement went so far as to argue that Israel’s flag should represent the aspirations of all its citizens, including its Arab minority.

I don’t invoke Kaplan because I believe he provides a simple answer to today’s political questions. He doesn’t.  And, Kaplan would not be seen today as a typical liberal – and certainly not a Progressive.

I invoke him because he gives us a way of asking a better question:

What kind of society does Jewish sovereignty make possible?

If the answer is a society in which Jews are secure, Judaism flourishes, democratic institutions are strong, minorities possess genuine political agency, and citizens with profoundly different identities can nevertheless build a common civic life—then we are moving toward something worthy of the Zionist project.

If the answer is a society in which political power is protected by systematically excluding an entire category of citizens from meaningful participation, then we have lost our way.

Ra’am is an especially important test.

Ra’am should not be romanticized.

Like every political party, it has positions with which I disagree. Its religious and political identity is different from mine. There are things its leaders have said and done that I would challenge.

That is not the point.

The point of democracy is not that we govern only with people whose beliefs we find comfortable.

The point is that we govern through negotiation with people who represent citizens who have a legitimate claim to participate.

Ra’am already demonstrated that this is possible.

When Ra’am joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, it became the first independent Arab party to formally participate in an Israeli governing coalition in decades. It did not cease being an Arab party. It did not cease being an Islamist party. The Jewish parties in the coalition did not cease being Jewish parties.

They negotiated.

They compromised.

They pursued shared interests.

They disagreed.

And, eventually, the government fell.

That’s democracy.

The fact that an experiment in Arab-Jewish political partnership did not last forever does not make the experiment illegitimate. Quite the opposite. It demonstrated that Israeli democracy is capable of something that many Israelis—and many observers outside Israel—have convinced themselves is impossible.

It demonstrated that political citizenship can cross communal boundaries.

So what should happen after October 27?

If the numbers make it possible, I believe Israeli political leaders should be willing to sit down with Ra’am and other Arab factions and ask a simple question:

What would it take for us to govern together?

Not:

How can we keep them out?

Not:

How can we use their votes without giving them influence?

Not:

How can we make them prove their loyalty before we recognize their legitimacy?

But:

What can we build together?

There will be red lines, of course.

Every coalition has red lines.

A party seeking to participate in government must accept the basic democratic framework of the state. It must reject violence against civilians. It must accept the legitimacy of political disagreement. And it must be prepared to negotiate and compromise.

But those standards must apply to everyone.

They cannot become a pretext for imposing a higher burden on Arab citizens than on Jewish citizens.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling is important precisely because it reaffirmed that principle. The Court did not say that every position expressed by Ra’am or the Joint List is correct. It said something more fundamental: the evidence did not justify denying these parties the right to compete in Israel’s democracy.

That distinction is essential.

A Jewish democracy must be confident enough to be democratic.

I am a Zionist because I believe the Jewish people need—and have a right to—a national home in our ancestral homeland.

I am also a pluralist because I believe that Jewish security and democratic equality are not competing values.  I believe them to be mutually reinforcing.

A confident Jewish society should not be frightened by the existence of Arab political power. It should not need to silence Arab citizens in order to preserve Jewish identity. And it should not confuse Jewish sovereignty with Jewish political exclusivity.

Indeed, I would argue the opposite.

The legitimacy of a Jewish democracy is strengthened—not weakened—when Arab citizens can participate fully in determining the country’s future.

That means voting.

It means serving in the Knesset.

It means criticizing the government.

It means winning elections.

And, yes, it means potentially serving in the government.

There is something profoundly democratic about the possibility that an Arab Israeli citizen can vote for an Arab party, that party can win seats in the Knesset, and those seats can become necessary to form a government.

That is not a failure of the Jewish state.

That is the democratic state functioning.

If Jewish Israelis want Arab citizens to feel genuine ownership of Israel’s future, then Arab citizens must have more than formal citizenship. They must have political agency.

And political agency means the possibility not merely of being represented in the opposition, but of sharing responsibility for governing the country.

The choice before Israel

The October 27 election will not resolve Israel’s deepest political questions.

It will not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It will not resolve questions of Jewish identity, religion and state, security, occupation, inequality, or the relationship between Israel and world Jewry.

But it can force Israel to confront one fundamental question:

Who belongs in the political community?

My answer is straightforward.

Everyone who is a citizen belongs.

That does not mean everyone gets their way.

It does not mean every political position is legitimate.

It does not mean Jewish Israelis must surrender their national identity or their legitimate security concerns.

It means that Arab citizens of Israel must have the same opportunity as Jewish citizens to shape the government that governs them.

Herzl imagined a Jewish state grounded in equality before the law.

Kaplan challenged us to imagine a Jewish civilization capable of embracing pluralism rather than retreating into tribalism.

And Israel’s Supreme Court has just reminded us that democracy cannot survive if political actors are permitted to eliminate their opponents simply because they dislike what those opponents represent.

The next step belongs to Israel’s political leaders.

If, after October 27, Ra’am holds the votes that could make a governing coalition possible, I hope someone has the courage to pick up the phone.

Not because Arab participation is a gift that Jews can bestow.

But because Arab citizens are already part of the state.

Because their votes are already part of the democracy.

Because their future is already bound up with Israel’s future.

And because the future of a Democratic and Jewish Israel depends on all its citizens whether Jewish or not—having a genuine voice in the affairs of the state.