Israel as a Shared Homeland

In December 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech at the Globes business conference in Jerusalem, where he outlined his social-security doctrine. Among other things, he said:

"The fact that Israel possesses military, technological, and economic strength gives us unprecedented political prosperity. The strong survive, alliances are made with the strong, peace is made with the strong, and the strong maintain peace, and we ensure that Israel remains very strong...

We are fighting Iran's proxies and its arm Hezbollah - we expose their tunnels and systematically deny them all tunnels as we did to Hamas in the south through various means, we deny them precision weapons through various means - they planned to have thousands of precision missiles and they have at best a few dozen."

Netanyahu at the Globes Israel Business Conference in Jerusalem, 2018. Photo: Kobi Gideon, Ltd. 

In this way, Netanyahu expressed the belief of many at that time that Israel was a solid and strong regional power. But precisely in the following year, that illusion was shattered. Starting in 2019, Israel experienced a series of election cycles and severe internal crises, and on October 7, 2023, the security illusion was also shattered.

Even now, after about seven years since the crisis began, Israel is dealing with a regional war of attrition and Israeli society continues to fragment from within. Polls show that these intense events have undermined the fundamental belief of most Israelis in the state's resilience. In 2018, when Netanyahu delivered his speech, more than 50% of Israelis believed that Israel's situation was "good or very good." But in 2025, only 20% of Israelis believe this [1]. Netanyahu's words at that conference will go down in Jewish history as historic words of folly.

Zionism's Achievements and Challenges

To understand how we reached the current crisis and how we can overcome it, we must return to examine the foundations of the Zionist movement and the wonderful achievements we have accomplished alongside the challenges that still await us.

Zionism is a just and worthy movement that expresses Jewish self-determination rights. The ingathering of Jews from all over the world and our return to our homeland in the Land of Israel is the fulfillment of human rights and the correction of a historical injustice. Zionism is the only national movement in the world that brought its national majority from all corners of the earth under the claim that we are "returning home" to the Land of Israel.

However, on the other hand, the unique approach of the Zionist movement created an unprecedented combination of nationalism and immigration that presents us with enormous challenges that have yet to be solved. Like any immigration state, we are required to answer two fundamental questions: How do we create a shared identity for a society that came from all over the world? And what will be our relations with the existing population? But in the Israeli case, the answers are influenced by deep national traditions. For example, the question of borders is influenced by the historical Jewish connection to Judea and Samaria, and the relations between religion and state are influenced by traditional Jewish law.

To deal with all these challenges, the Zionist movement adopted a narrative according to which Jewish heterogeneity and Palestinian presence in the Land of Israel are historical accidents. According to this approach, the Jewish people were forcibly exiled from their land and scattered throughout the world, and only because of this is Jewish society polarized and Palestinians settled here while we were absent [2].

From this narrative derives Israel's state policy - a combination of melting pot and iron wall. A melting pot aimed at turning Jews into a uniform nation, and an iron wall aimed at controlling as many territories as possible to defend Israel's borders against the efforts of Palestinians and the peoples of the region. This means that in this policy, the unified Jewish nation is the only group entitled to collective rights between the sea and the Jordan River. All other subgroups within the Jewish people or the Palestinian nation are not recognized by the state.

The Strategic Collapse

But over the years it became clear that this model leads us to strategic collapse. Already in the 1950s, state leaders realized that this state policy cannot solve four foundational challenges: What is our constitution? How do we regulate relations between religion and state? What will be the status of Arab society in Israel? And where will the state's borders run?

Therefore, the state's founders chose to whitewash the problem and blur it. In all four of these issues, a policy of ambiguity or internal contradiction was adopted, because any attempt to decide on them would require confrontation with the national and emotional ethos of Jewish society in Israel.

The result of this ambiguity is that Israeli society is forced to live with strategic dangers. We exist as a torn society in a tiny territory, with a centralized government that links all the disputes among us to each other, without having enough soldiers to simultaneously defend all the territories we control. No modern democracy is required to deal with such a challenging combination of dangers and threats.

Therefore, since the 1980s, Israeli society has been fragmenting and our security challenges have been mounting. Until 2019, most of us were mistaken in thinking that our state model works. But since then, most of us understand that there is no escape from changing direction. We are approaching a critical breaking point.

Why Don't We Change Direction?

The answer is emotional. We are not ready to take the required step and recognize the equal value of all the different groups in Israeli society or the Palestinian nation because we still see their very existence as a "historical accident. Prof. Sami Smooha's 2019 survey showed that only 34.5% of Jews believe Arabs have historical and national territorial rights equal to those of Jews [3].

Under such conditions, no prime minister in Israel can stand against public sentiment. Therefore, our political leadership avoids presenting its own political initiative and adopts a strategy of passive waiting until the international community imposes a solution from outside. This is how Ehud Barak acted at Camp David following American pressure in 2000, and this is how Netanyahu acted in the current war. The reason for this pattern is simple: the leadership prefers to bear heavy costs of directionless policy just so it can justify its actions to the public by claiming that it did not recognize Palestinian rights but only surrendered to external pressures.

The results speak for themselves: in the current war, we initially refused any proposal to transfer control to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. But now the Palestinian Authority will be involved in Gaza under conditions that limit our freedom of action. This is in contrast to the West Bank, where our willing cooperation with the Palestinian Authority has preserved our full freedom of action.

Even in domestic affairs, Israeli society struggles to take the required step and decentralize the government system like other advanced democracies in the world. We prefer to deepen the national divide and separate the populations from one another instead of recognizing the equal diversity of all groups in Israel and thereby creating a more cohesive society.

A Chosen Homeland

In order for us to find the courage and internal strength to change Israel's state policy and adapt it to 21st century challenges, we must tell a broader Israeli story that recognizes the equal value of all groups in Israeli society and the Palestinian nation.

Jerusalem, 2015 (illustration). Photo: Kyrylo Glivin / Shutterstock.com

The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is ancient and unique. It is expressed in poetry, prayer, symbols, traditions, and archaeology spanning thousands of years. But the Jewish people never arose in the Land of Israel - it always marched toward it. From biblical times to modern Zionism, the Jewish people always gathered in the diaspora and marched to the Land of Israel to fulfill its values and dreams.

This means that the Land of Israel is a chosen homeland- a homeland toward which we march to fulfill our dreams. Therefore, it is called in Jewish tradition "the Promised Land". Two facts emerge from this: First, the Jewish nation coming from the diaspora will always be tribal and heterogeneous. We cannot and do not want to be a homogeneous nation. We must decentralize the governmental structure and recognize that all Jewish groups are equal to each other.

Second, other people already lived in this land. Every time we Jews march to the Land of Israel, we discover that there are other peoples who have settled here. Therefore, this land is a shared homeland for the Jewish people and the peoples of the land. This fact is known even in the biblical story, when Abraham says to the Hittites living in the land " I am a resident alien among you", and when Moses commands not to take control of the lands of Ammon and Moab "For I will not give you any of their land as a possession; I have assigned Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot" [4].

The Conclusion: A New Israeli Partnership

If we do not understand the full Jewish story and continue to tell ourselves that Israeli heterogeneity and Palestinian nationalism are historical accidents - then we will not be able to find the emotional capacity to change direction. We will continue to cling to constitutional and security theories that bring disaster upon us. Thus Israeli society will continue to radicalize, our enemies from outside will continue to breach our borders, and the State of Israel will continue to crumble.

Our third return to Zion in the modern era - following the two ancient returns from the biblical period - requires us to ensure that this time we act differently. We must adopt a new Zionist model that recognizes equal rights for all groups in Israeli society and the national rights of the Palestinian people.

Although this path will not be free of dangers, ultimately after a long journey it will lead us to safe shores. In the first stage, we will defend against terrorism while strengthening international stability, regional security, and internal cohesion. In the second stage, we will achieve constitutional equal rights and Jewish-Palestinian reconciliation.

Only in this way can we preserve the achievement of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state for future generations, and complete the Zionist mission of creating a secure and prosperous national home for the Jewish people and all citizens of Israel.

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[1] Tamar Hermann, Lior Yochanni, Yaron Kaplan and Ina Orly Spožnikov, The Israeli Democracy Index 2025 (The Israel Democracy Institute, Jerusalem 2025) p. 24.

[2] For a broader discussion on this topic see: Ganz, Chaim. Political Theory for the Jewish People: Three Zionist Narratives. Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 2013.

[3] Sami Smooha, Still Playing by the Rules: Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2019 (University of Haifa, 2020), 213-214.

[4] Genesis 23:4; Deuteronomy 2:9.