Will the REAL Israel…Please Stand Up? Israel’s democracy is at a critical juncture.

Less than five weeks before Israel is scheduled to hold its next national election, the country has arrived at a moment that should concern every Israeli—and everyone who cares about Israel, whether Jewish or not.

On September 23, Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify two predominantly Arab political lists, Ra’am and the Joint List, from participating in the October 27 election. The committee is composed largely of representatives of political parties. The decisions are not final: the parties are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, which will have the ultimate say. Significantly, representatives of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the disqualifications, arguing that the evidence did not meet the demanding legal standard required to prevent a political party from participating in an election.

That distinction matters enormously.

This is not an argument that Ra’am or the Joint List should be supported politically. Israelis do—will—and should—disagree vigorously about their platforms, their leaders and their vision for the country. A democracy depends upon precisely that freedom to disagree.

The question is more fundamental:

Who gets to participate in the democratic conversation?

Israel is now approaching a critical juncture in which the answer to that question may tell us far more about the country than the outcome of any particular election.

I am an American Jew who loves Israel—not because I believe it has always lived up to its highest ideals, but because I believe those ideals are worth loving, defending and demanding that Israel live up to.

I also believe deeply that the future of Israelis and Palestinians must ultimately lie in coexistence, partnership and mutual recognition. I do not believe that this vision is naïve. It is the only vision that offers a sustainable future worthy of the aspirations that gave rise to Zionism and, ultimately, to the State of Israel.

That is why the attempted exclusion of Israel’s principal Arab political lists troubles me so deeply.

Ra’am is not some abstract political entity outside Israeli society. It is an Israeli political party representing Arab citizens of Israel. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, participated in an Israeli governing coalition in 2021–22. And this year Ra’am has gone a step further by placing former Jewish Knesset member Yoav Segalovitz on its electoral slate. Segalovitz has described his decision in terms of breaking down walls and pursuing genuine partnership.

Whatever one thinks of Ra’am’s politics, that development should at least complicate any reflexive assumption that Arab political participation and Jewish political participation can only exist in separate worlds.

It is precisely here that Israel’s democratic character is being tested.

A democratic state must be able to distinguish between ideas it finds objectionable and political participation that is legally impermissible. (A distinction many American leaders would do well to understand.)  Israel’s Basic Law does establish circumstances under which a candidate or political list can be barred—including rejecting Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, inciting racism, or supporting armed struggle against the state. But the Supreme Court has historically interpreted those provisions narrowly, requiring clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence that a prohibited objective is a dominant feature of a party’s activity.

That high threshold exists for a reason.

Once a democracy begins excluding political movements because of stereotypes, associations, isolated statements or interpretations of ambiguous evidence—or even worse, political expediency, the protection offered by democratic participation becomes conditional. And when the people being excluded are members of a national minority, the danger is greater still.

This is not merely about Arabs.

It is about what Israel means when it calls itself Jewish and democratic.

The tension between those two words has never been theoretical. It has been at the heart of the Zionist project from the beginning. And some of the movement’s earliest thinkers understood that Jewish national renewal would have to be measured not simply by Jewish power, but by the society Jews created when they finally possessed power.

Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) made the case for Jewish sovereignty, but it did not envision sovereignty as a license for religious or national hierarchy. He wrote explicitly of a society in which people would be “free and undisturbed” in their faith or disbelief and in which people of other creeds and nationalities would receive “equality before the law.” Six years later, in Altneuland, he imagined what that sovereignty might produce: a Jewish homeland in which Arabs and Jews lived alongside one another and participated in a shared society.

Herzl was hardly a modern liberal democrat in every sense we would understand today. His own thinking about the Arab population of Palestine was complicated and, in important respects, deeply inadequate. But his imagined future nonetheless contained a remarkable proposition: Jewish national sovereignty need not require the political subordination of those who were not Jewish.

Mordecai Kaplan took the concern even further. In The Future of the American Jew, he explicitly warned of the dangers inherent in nationalism and in the exercise of national sovereignty when it becomes detached from democratic procedure and ethical purpose. For Kaplan, Jewish peoplehood was not an end in itself; it had to justify itself through what it contributed to human civilization.

These were not warnings that Israel should abandon Jewish nationalism or sovereignty. They were warnings about what nationalism and sovereignty can become when they cease to be tethered to democratic and ethical ideals.

That warning feels remarkably prescient today.

That question is particularly meaningful to me because of the way I understand Judaism itself.

My own understanding of Judaism, shaped by Reconstructionist Judaism, reinforces this conviction. Jewish peoplehood, as I understand it, is not something fixed and finished, but something we continually create through the choices we make. Jewish peoplehood carries both a history and a responsibility: the opportunity to build a Jewish future that reflects the values we claim to cherish. I have come to think about Israel in much the same way.

Israel is not simply an achievement to be defended. It is a living experiment in what Jewish self-determination can become—and what it can share with the world.

That does not mean abandoning the Jewish character of the state. Nor does it mean ignoring the very real security threats Israel faces. It means recognizing that Jewish sovereignty creates responsibilities as well as rights—and that the character of the society Jews build when they possess political power is itself part of the Jewish story.

That is why this moment matters so deeply to me.

I believe the future of Israelis and Palestinians ultimately depends upon finding a way to move from conflict toward coexistence and, eventually, partnership. That future cannot be built by denying the political agency of either people. Nor can it be built by treating Israeli Arabs as permanent guests in a state of which they are citizens.

A Jewish and democratic Israel must be capable of holding two truths simultaneously: Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, and its Arab citizens are full participants in the country’s civic and political life.

Those principles should reinforce one another, even if they will inevitably exist in a productive tension that must be continually negotiated.

Five weeks from now, Israelis will go to the polls. Before then, the Supreme Court will confront the question of whether two predominantly Arab political lists may participate in that election.

The Court’s decision will not resolve the enormous questions facing Israel: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of the territories, the meaning of Jewish nationalism, the rights of Arab citizens, the place of religion in public life, or the country’s increasingly profound political divisions.

But it is an extraordinarily important moment.

It will ask, in concrete legal terms, whether the evidence presented is sufficient to remove major political lists from the democratic process. More broadly, it will force Israel to confront a question that is much harder to answer:

When Israel says that it is a Jewish and democratic state, what does the word “democratic” require when democracy becomes inconvenient?

For those of us who love Israel and love its people, this is not a choice between loving the country and criticizing it.

It is precisely because we believe in what Israel aspired to become that we must be willing to ask whether it is living up to that aspiration.  And, when the answer is “no”, not to abandon it, but to demand that it return.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to that old American television question:

Will the REAL Israel…please stand up?

Not the Israel imagined by its enemies. Not the Israel idealized by its admirers. Not even the Israel that appears in our own political arguments and projections.

The Israel that chooses, in this moment, what it means to be both Jewish and democratic.

And perhaps that is the most important question before Israel today:

What kind of country does Israel want to be when it finally has to choose between the security of its political power and the courage of its democratic ideals?