Israel: Voices and Visions

3. Oren Wacht: Israel’s healthcare system is a model for coexistence

Photo by Nadine Epstein

As the head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Ben-Gurion University, Oren Wacht was directly involved in October 7 rescue efforts and was leaving for reserve duty with his EMT unit the day after I spoke with him. He lives with his wife and children in Beer Sheva and is deeply concerned about Israel’s future. “I would like to see a place for my kids and next generations to live in happily, in a place more concentrated on joyful things than on war and death and destruction,” he says. Even before October 7, most of Wacht’s memories as a child, and especially as an adult, centered around wars and terrorist attacks. “It’s because of what I do in life but not just because of that. I can’t foresee the future, but I’m optimistic because I think there are a lot of very good things that are happening here. I travel a lot and I see what’s happening in other countries and I think there’s something special here that connects people.

He thinks it’s important for Israelis to focus on the 90 percent of what they have in common. “My son is in a Jewish-Arab school where half the kids are Jewish. My daughter was also in this school for many years. This is important for me because there are many partners here who are not Jewish but who are part of the Israeli culture, part of the Israeli being. People who want to live here together with us, we adopt them and make them feel part of us. People who want to kill us, we should kill.”

Wacht believes Israel’s healthcare system can serve as a model for coexistence. “If you go to the doctor or the emergency room in Israel, you’ll see how things work,” he says. “I always give an example about Jewish holidays. Muslim and Christian staff do the shifts so that we can have a holiday. And when they have Ramadan, we do the shifts. It’s not an issue.”

4. Orli Gold Haklay: Getting the hostages out is the top priority

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Orli Gold Haklay attends demonstrations in her hometown of Beer Sheva every Saturday night to push for the return of the hostages and for new elections. She is a longtime member of Women Wage Peace, a grassroots peace movement in Israel whose purpose is to promote a political agreement, involving women in the process. “We believe that women have a unique ability to be more flexible to reach agreements and to be more determined than men,” she says. “Women sit down at the table and always see before them the children whose lives will end just because we’re too stubborn or too inflexible to reach agreements with our neighbors.” Women Wage Peace, she says, works very closely with Women of the Sun, “a group of very ambitious and brave Palestinian women from the West Bank and also from Gaza, whose lives could be in danger if people knew what they’re doing with us.” Before October 7, Women Wage Peace would go to the Gaza border with their phones and communicate with women on the other side of the fence. “Palestinian women stood there with their cell phones, telling us that they do believe in peace and not to give in and to stay in it for both sides, and that you always have extremists on both sides.” On October 4, some 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian members of Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun rallied for peace in Jerusalem and on the shores of the Dead Sea. Three days later, three members of Women Wage Peace, including cofounder Vivian Silver, were killed by Hamas terrorists.

Since October 7, Haklay has refocused her energy on the hostages, giving out yellow ribbons at every opportunity and talking about them as if they are her own family members. “The next step is that we have to get all of them out,” she says. “They’re being tortured. They’re dying. We feel like the government isn’t doing enough. The prime minister’s definitely not doing enough. That’s number one. Number two is to reach some kind of political agreement, because we can’t do it by force; Hamas is not a terrorist group that can be beaten. I don’t think anyone would not like to see Hamas disappear, but it’s not going to happen.”

Haklay moved to Beer Sheva from Texas with her parents 40 years ago. Shortly afterward, she remembers standing with her father watching a cavalcade of cars coming down the street. “The neighbors said, ‘Don’t look up, don’t look up,’ and my dad asked why and they said, ‘Because the Egyptians are going to bomb us from above.’ Our neighbors couldn’t believe that the Egyptians wanted peace. And here we are all these years later and not one soldier has been killed on the Egyptian border. So peace is possible and it’s something I think Israelis need to believe—or be convinced of.”

5. Dan Blumberg: Inventing new technologies ensures Israel’s future

Photo by Nadine Epstein

The chair of the Israel Space Agency and a vice president at Ben-Gurion University, Dan Blumberg is a firm believer in the power of technology. “If I look five years ahead, we will again be a leading country with a lot of new products,” he says. “We will be strong again. We have the capability of developing a flourishing ecosystem around space technologies, which will make huge changes to the world in the future. We can already see what Elon Musk is doing with StarLink. It’s a revolution, not only an evolution.” Blumberg explains that Israel was the eighth country in the world to gain full access to space despite its unique challenges. “For example, we are the only country in the world that has to launch satellites to the west and not to the east,” he says, which means lighter payloads and significant technical adjustments. “We are also a smaller country, so we have to build smaller and cheaper. We have the potential of being a leader in this area.”

Blumberg also sees Israel as a leader in technologies that make life possible in desert climes—as David Ben-Gurion dreamed it would be. “We developed desalination using reverse osmosis,” he says. “We developed innovative irrigation techniques, and we’re going to develop a whole lot of new technologies related to the big challenges, which are food supply, water supply, energy supply.” In order to build new technologies that Israel can rely on in the future, Blumberg believes Israel needs to invest in education and that societal inequities need to be addressed. “The challenge is more of a political issue than a social issue. The ultra-Orthodox need to join the technological workforce.” This should not conflict with their living a religious life, he says. Historically, after all, “Torah learning has never stopped people from working and going into industry.”

6. Menachem Klein: Getting rid of Netanyahu won’t solve the problem

A retired professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and former board member of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Menachem Klein has a hard time coming up with a positive vision for the future right now. “ We shouldn’t think that if we get rid of Netanyahu, everything goes back to the Israel we knew from 1967 or 1994, when Israel was a peace-loving society ready to compromise and the settlers were a very small minority of crazy people,” he says. “That has really changed. Netanyahu has succeeded in bringing into the upper echelon what we call the settlers, but it is really the right wing—the extreme right wing and moderate right. Israel of the labor movement and of the Oslo generation doesn’t exist anymore. We see this in the General Staff of the IDF. We see it also in the security services and in how they operate and how they cooperate with settlers.”

Klein adds: “I hate the title ‘settlers’ because they don’t only live in the occupied territories. We have settlers with the same mentality and ideology and policy who live within Israel’s 1948 borders. They are now in government, and they operate all the state bureaucracy. Israel is a state that wants to control the Palestinians and exercise superiority over the Palestinians. To change this will be very difficult. It will create a huge crisis inside Israel, maybe civil war, and the army will be under the control of the right wing.”

7. Neil Gandal: It’s time to integrate the “four tribes” of Israel

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Neil Gandal is a professor of economics at Tel Aviv University who grew up in Ohio and is concerned that what he calls the Messianic part of Israel’s population—referring to the ultra-Orthodox—doesn’t appreciate democracy and is not integrated into Israeli society. “The most important thing we have to deal with are the four ‘tribes’ in Israel. Unfortunately, the four tribes were set up by the ministry of education, because everyone here attends separate schools. We have regular nonreligious public schools. We have religious public schools. We have ultra-Orthodox schools. We have Arab schools. It’s a real tragedy. It’s complete segregation; we can’t even talk to each other.”

Gandal has a very clear vision of what has to be done, based on his own childhood experience in public schools in Ohio. “We have to have everybody attend the same schools and we have to meet and talk,” he says, and soon. “Half of the children in first grade now are either in a religious or Arab school.”

One positive note is that he’s seen a big jump in numbers of Palestinian Israelis attending universities, particularly in economics, computer science and engineering. As an economist, he’s also also concerned about the marginal tax rates in Israel, which are high and could soon go up even higher. Such high tax rates could discourage future generations from living in Israel.

8. Isaac Bentwich: Business synergies with the Gulf States could change everything

Photo by Nadine Epstein

A medical doctor, Isaac Bentwich is the founder and CEO of Quris, an artificial intelligence innovator that seeks to transform the drug development process. He has been an entrepreneur for 30 years and has seen Israel’s tech industry survive several waves of ups and downs. “Israel is an amazing phenomena of entrepreneurship,” he says. “More money is invested here than anywhere else other than in Silicon Valley. The tech economy has become a major locomotive of the Israeli economy. This is a mission and a new form of Zionism.”

Bentwich is inspired by collaborations with investors from the United Arab Emirates. “I truly believe and I’m excited about the possibility of building bridges through commerce,” he says. “Every time I travel to Abu Dhabi, I’m impressed with how close and how far we are to a totally different situation. It’s infinitely far and infinitely close. The business synergies between us and the surrounding countries are amazing. The door has been opened. It will change the world; so if we manage collectively to pass through these dire straits, there’s an amazing future that may not be far away.”

Calling the current situation a “really dark point in the journey of Israel,” Bentwich hopes the profound shake-up in Israel, as well as in Gaza, will open the door to a deeper realignment. The immediate goal, he says, is to “heal and grow from this place of trauma and try through inner dialogue to not fall into extremism.”

Benwich would like to see Israel move in the direction of a modern, prosperous society that strikes a balance between the Jewish origins of the country and democracy. “There’s a misconception that you can live here without solving problems, without having rights for other people who are living here, without solving the difficult problem of extremism,” he says. When he walks through the streets of Tel Aviv and sees what is emerging in Israel (“this multicultural, chaotic, messy but beautiful place”), he thinks the nation now has a second chance to grow up. He hopes that young generations that were staying away from politics will now take charge. “We’re not going to continue to live in this madness where the religious zealots run us to the ground and the corruption is clear,” he says. “The religious and ultra-religious are living off subsidies that other people are paying, and that’s not tenable.” Of course, he adds, change is easier said than done. “It could all go up in flames. We don’t know. Will my children and grandchildren find this place hospitable, or will this place and the Zionist experiment burn to the ground? I’m very optimistic, but it’s a real question.”

9. Dorit Beinisch: The current government is endangering the country

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Dorit Beinisch, the former chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, is pessimistic about Israel’s current direction. She doesn’t see signs that the current government understands the problems of the era. “We have to find a way to live here together but we’re so divided, I’m not sure we can find a bridge,” she says. “We were always in a state of danger, that didn’t start today, but our leaders knew that and they found ways to compromise with our allies outside Israel. We are a small state and we have to rely on other democratic states like the United States and be independent, of course very independent, but not alone in the world. The feeling I have now is that the government has lost it. You hear people sitting in government saying, ‘We don’t need anyone. We don’t need ammunition from the States. We don’t need recognition from the States. We will manage somehow.’ And some people say even more dangerous things like, ‘Everything belongs to us. We don’t need Palestinians in the West Bank. We don’t care, it’s ours.’ I think that we have to change the government because we cannot afford a state with an extreme national government. Our existence is in danger.”

Bensich doesn’t believe that a constitution can be agreed on at this point. “There is no consensus and the extremes are too strong,” she says. She’s also worried about Israel being internationally isolated. “Our claim to fame is science achievement in the high-tech field,” she says, and she believes Israel is on the edge of losing cooperation with academics, universities and scientific institutions. “This cooperation is our power, and if we lose it, it’s dangerous.”

She has one source of optimism at the moment. “We found out in this dark period that we actually have very good people,“ she says. “They replaced the government on October 7 and took it upon themselves to give civil assistance to those who needed it.”

10. Erez Eshel: A conservative Israel is a strong Israel

Photo by Nadine Epstein

A former deputy director of the Israeli Ministry of Education, founder of a pre-army leadership academy, and strategic leadership consultant, Erez Eshel is a lieutenant colonel and a commander in the IDF reserves. “We can blame October 7 on the evilness of Hamas in Gaza and on Palestinians in the West Bank, but really, it’s our problem,” he says. “We were confused, totally confused. After the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s army had 23 divisions. But America didn’t like the strength of the Jews and slowly, slowly, told us that we could depend on them, that they would help us. And because we are Jews, and we don’t want war—we want peace and to create ideas and literature and philosophy about the good of human beings, and believe in freedom for every human being and that human beings are created in the image of God—we slowly closed more and more units of Israel’s army. We were too naïve and, sometimes, we were too arrogant. Now we have to again become the strongest army in the Middle East. We have to rebuild the Jewish army because there’s evil in this world. We thought that evil existed only in the Holocaust, but now we see it still exists.”

Eshel says that Israel’s “courageous, unbelievable young people” are going to build an Israeli state as an example for the world. But it will take time. “It’s going to be a long war,” he says. “It won’t end in less than three to five years.” He views the war as a clash of civilizations that in the end will strengthen Israel. “We are going to see a restart of the state of the Jewish people,” he says. “I can confirm it will be hard. There will be a price, but we will have to be strong. We’re going to win, we’re going to vanquish Hamas. We’re going to vanquish all our enemies in the West Bank.” The new Israel, he says, will create a belt of security everywhere. “We won’t compromise anymore for our safety or with the safety of our kids and grandkids. We have to have a multi-generational perspective. We have to become again more conservative.”

11. Daniel Chamovitz: 18 to 35-year-olds are the strongest generation in Israel’s history

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Daniel Chamovitz, the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the burden of Israel’s future is now on the shoulders of Israel’s younger generation. “I think we’ve seen after what happened on October 7, the younger generation of Israel from ages 18 to 35, who we thought were superficial and the TikTok generation, have proven themselves to be the strongest generation ever in the history of Israel, and that’s saying a lot,” he says. “They’ve fought through the hardest war, they’ve dealt with greater loss than ever before, and they did this while leaving their jobs where they were making more money than ever before. And this happened to 70 to 80 percent of them, on the right and on the left, not including the ultra-Orthodox.”

Chamovitz has made 37 shiva calls since October 7 up and down and across the east and west of Israel. “There’s nothing that defined who I was meeting with except for an absolute love and commitment to the country,” he says. “So what brings me hope is that this generation now has to take on the mantle of leadership. Our generation failed. The young generation can take the responsibility just like our generation did after the 1973 war when they basically told the generation that founded the country, ‘Your time is up, you gotta’ go, and now we have to change.’”

12. Gerald Steinberg: Israel needs a pragmatic prime minister who leads from the center

Photo by Mindy Weisel

A retired professor of political studies from Bar Ilan University, Gerald Steinberg is the founder and executive director of the watchdog group NGO Monitor, which tracks human rights NGOs that work in the arena of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He describes himself as a centrist and says, “I’ve been warning for years against the human rights organizations that are now eviscerating Israel.”

“My vision for Israel begins after Netanyahu,” he says, since he believes “the government must change.” He hopes for the nation’s sake that Netanyahu will leave voluntarily and envisions a period of transitional and pragmatic leaders, who will almost inevitably be from the military. “Those are the people who are most well known in Israel and I think have the greatest opportunity to lead to a changed society.” In his book, Menachem Begin and the Israel-Egypt Peace Process: Between Ideology and Political Realism, Steinberg talks about how when Begin became prime minister, he left ideology behind for pragmatism. Other Israeli leaders, such as Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin, also became more pragmatic over time. “Pragmatism is essential to moving toward consensus and building coalitions,” Steinberg says, “particularly in the face of political isolation.”

Israel’s next leaders will have to govern from the center. “We don’t always agree, but we accept the common principles of what we need to do to survive as a nation state of the Jewish people under a Zionist framework,” he says. “That means everybody’s going to need to move toward the center and give up some parts of what they want. That’s going to require a different kind of leadership, a consensus-based leadership, where you have a leader who says, ‘This is what I think is right for the country. If you don’t like it, then vote me out.’ And Bibi never did that. Most politicians are not like that.”

“The Likud Party,” he adds, is going to “have to go through an extreme rebuilding process once Bibi is out because the only thing that holds it together is Bibi. There’s not really much of an ideology there against the left, whatever that may mean, since there is no left anymore to be against.”

13. Orni Petruschka: Only a two-state solution can ensure Israel’s Jewish character

photo courtesy of Orni Petruschka

Orni Petruschka was a fighter pilot in the Israeli air force who became a highly successful tech entrepreneur in the alternative energy field. He is a cofounder of Blue White Future, a civic initiative focused on moving Israel toward a two-state solution. He is also chair of Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, and the Israeli Chairman of the Abraham Initiatives, a Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli NGO that advances social inclusion and equal rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Petruschka envisions a Jewish state in which “holidays that stem from the roots of the Jewish people will be celebrated,” but “doesn’t have a rabbinate that has control over anyone. Religion should be a matter of choice,” he says. “The ultra-Orthodox, who vote in very high percentages and get their orders from rabbinical institutions, need to be integrated into society.” He believes technology will help in this process, because it prevents the ultra-Orthodox from being as closed off and as isolated from the rest of society as they have been in the past.

“The next step is to replace the Israeli government and embark on a route that will lead to a Palestinian state in a few years.”

– Orni Petruschka

Two states are a requirement for this vision of Israel, says Petruschka. “The next step is to replace the Israeli government and embark on a route that will lead to a Palestinian state in a few years.” It will likely be a demilitarized Palestinian state more or less divided by the Green Line, he says, “with some land swaps that will allow some of the settlements to stay within Israel.” Palestinians can be compensated by an international fund for refugees. “I think [a Palestinian state] can happen in conjunction with Israel being accepted within the entire region.” He says that Saudi Arabia holds the key to peace in the region since half of the Arab world’s wealth is in Saudi Arabia, as well as the two holiest places in Islam.

Petruschka is inspired by Eyal Waldman, a fellow high-tech entrepreneur and pro-democracy activist whose daughter Danielle was killed along with her boyfriend as they tried to flee the Nova Music Festival on October 7. After receiving a 2024 Israel Prize, Waldman promised to rededicate himself to peace as his daughter would have wanted.

14. Meron Rapoport: A confederation is better than the classic two-state solution

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Meron Rapoport is cofounder of the Israeli-Palestinian movement A Land For All, previously known as Two States, One Homeland, which calls for a confederation with an independent Israeli state and independent Palestinian state. He is also an editor and writer at the Israeli publication Local Call.

“Two peoples stand on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” says Rapoport. “Both of these peoples see the whole of this land as their homeland. They’re intertwined, so the way to go forward is equal collective political and personal rights for all Jews and Palestinians, which means, in practical terms, two independent states, Israel and Palestine along the 1967 borders.” In his vision, these two states are part of a larger entity. “You can call it a confederation, you can call it a union that allows for the things that are shared, to be shared, and for the things that should be separate to be run separately. It sounds a little bit abstract. But if you take the example of the European Union, or conflict resolutions since World War II, like those in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, it can be done.” It won’t be easy, he warns. “It’s not all roses. People don’t forget the past so fast. But the idea of sharing power is the best guarantee for peace, stability and eventual reconciliation.”

Rapoport says that the classical two-state solution that was based on separation and walls is no longer relevant. “We have to reform it to bring it closer to reality and make it more just,” he says.”I know it sounds far away now, but I think if you would have asked a Frenchman hiding in a basement in Paris in 1945 whether these German soldiers who are walking on the floorboards above his head will be part of the same union a few years from the end of the war, or that there would be the Schengen Agreement and he would be able to live in Berlin and Germans could live in Paris with no problem, he would have said that’s not possible. But it happened.”

15. Fania Oz-Salzberger: Peace will take time but we can have a territorial agreement soon

Photo courtesy of Fania Oz-Salzberger

A historian and writer, Fania Oz-Salzberger is a passionate supporter of the anti-judicial reform movement and other protests against Israel’s current government. “Whenever I was asked about my vision all the way back to the days of Rabin, I used the three cherries metaphor,” she says. “When you go to Las Vegas, which I did once in my life (and never will again), you need to get three cherries in a row in those gambling machines in order to win. We in the Middle East need three cherries in a row, that is a brave Israeli leader, a brave Palestinian leader and strong hands-on international mediation and guidance. We’ve had one, we’ve had two, but never three, and it’s been a while since we’ve had two,” she says. “This is what we need now. We need both Israeli and Palestinian leaders brave enough, not perfect, but brave enough to sit down for territorial agreements, and we need extremely hyperactive international involvement and commitment all the way down to forces policing and administrating Gaza in the interim,” she says. “We cannot transform Gaza into an upstanding government this early in the game, so we will need people to step in, especially from the modern Arab countries. Hopefully Saudi Arabia will lead the way and send people to police and de-radicalize the population. I would love to see a little less extreme NATO and for the European Union to intervene and send armed peacekeeping forces. That’s what I expect from the world.”

Oz-Salzberger hopes elections will come soon, and that some kind of center-left government can be cobbled together to represent what she sees as the moderate majority. “I don’t even mind a center-right government like the Lapid-Bennet one that was only two years ago,” she says. Although she has been calling for a peace deal for decades, at this point she is not. “I don’t see peace between the Israelis and Gazans including Hamas and the civilians who cheered on October 7,” she says. “I do see a territorial agreement, and that’s good enough for the time being.”

16. Buzi Raviv: Changing how we communicate might allow Israel to survive

Buzi Aviv launched and runs the student radio station at Ben-Gurion University. “Plants are so quiet and full of life and are much stronger than us,” says Aviv, who holds a PhD in molecular biology. “They survive almost everywhere on the planet. We depend on them and we need to learn from them,” he says. “They have sustainable reproductive units, seeds, and when there are harsh environments such as storms and heat waves, they are carefully hidden in the ground and survive. This leads me to ask, what are the seeds that we want to plant in the ground? What is the most important thing we want to keep if there is a storm, so it will grow back when the storm is over?”

Israel, today, needs to consider this, he says. “Israel can survive the military aspect, it’s bad but we can survive,” he says. He is less sure that the nation can survive the social fragmentation process Israel is going through. “There are a lot of people in despair,” he says. “They don’t know if we can survive together, if we can stay together as a whole unit. Then there’s this conflict between the secular versus religious people. What I would like to see in the future is more understanding and more human communication than we have at the moment.”

“We can’t keep going in the same direction as we have been for the past few years. If we do, I don’t think we’ll survive.”

– Buzi Aviv

Aviv believes that radio “is a good setting for human communication. When you are on the air, it’s the opposite of being anonymous, which is what characterizes social media. On social media you can write anything you want and say anything you want without being responsible for it. On the radio you’re super responsible for what you say and it takes you to a frequency that is a very good place to meet other human beings, and for having complex discussions. It’s a method of communication that is bringing out the good in us.”

He thinks that Israel might survive if the kinds of settings that encourage responsible conversations are supported and created. “We can’t keep going in the same direction as we have been for the past few years. If we do, I don’t think we’ll survive.” And then, he says, “it will be time to plant seeds to grow somewhere.” These seeds, he says, are cultural treasures, philosophies and forms of community. “We need to hide them and protect them so they will survive the storm.” Aviv also suggests that Israelis learn from the country’s pioneers, and hopes that new kinds of pioneers will take the lead.

17. Shuli Dichter: A shared society between the river & the sea

Photo by Nadine Epstein

A kibbutznik, a leader of NGOs promoting equality and a Jewish-Arab shared society, and the author of Sharing the Promised Land: In Pursuit of Equality Between Jewish and Arab Citizens in Israel, Shuli Dichter has a clear vision for Israel’s future. “The major element of life between the river and the sea must be the notion of belonging both by the Palestinians and by the Jews to this homeland on an equal basis,” he says. “We both belong here. It’s the sense of possessiveness that would change in my vision. We would jointly take care of this land and take care of these two peoples. When I say a country from the river to the sea, it’s totally dependent on mutual recognition and equality.” Dichter recognizes that his vision is shared by few others. “The vast majority of Jews in Israel do not wish to see this,” he says, “so those who do must practice it as much as possible in daily life until it becomes the political vision of the rest.”

This will require volunteering together to build partnerships everywhere—from shared schools and educational communities to initiatives for healthcare centers.
“It’s important to do anything possible to bring Palestinians and Jews together on an equal basis with shared ownership,” he says. “It is critical to sit together, create language for such partnerships and, most important, to remain partners. This is what I see for the next two decades,” he says. “I believe it will be enough.”

18 Naomi Ragen: Peace is not possible with radical jihadists

Photo by Nadine Epstein

A prolific novelist, Naomi Ragen is Modern Orthodox. In 2002, she and her family were attending a seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, when a Hamas terrorist detonated a bomb that killed 30 people and injured 140. She found October 7 and its aftermath to be very clarifying. “A lot of disputes that were tearing the Jewish people apart have now been resolved in the most brutal way possible,” she says. “Because the whole idea of land for peace, the whole idea of being able to live in neighborly friendliness with jihadi groups has been clarified. So all the good people who loved Israel but thought they needed to make peace with the Palestinians are beginning to understand that this is not a dispute about land. It’s cultural, it’s religious and it has very deep roots.”

Ragen believes that Israel has to finish this war and destroy Hamas. “There’s no future for Israel and there’s no future for anybody in this area if you do not defeat Hamas and other radical jihadi groups,” she says. “If you look at the history of Islam, whenever there have been periods when radicals took over, it was terrible for everyone the whole world over. Israel just happens to be on the front lines.”

She is grateful for the Abraham Accords and for the openness toward Israel among Sunni Muslims in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, and for the changes that have occurred within these societies that were unimaginable years ago. “All of a sudden we have more in common with them than with other radical Arab states,” she says. “We’re really on the same side now. We have a common set of interests that we can build on. And those interests are to protect ourselves from fanatics. We want to raise our children in the atmosphere of peace. We want our economies to flourish, and I think that’s possible.”

Ragen considers Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be a lost cause because they have been indoctrinated by fanatics. “We have to get rid of Hamas,” she says. “The Palestinian Authority is just as bad. I don’t see any difference between them and Hamas except for the fact they would perhaps not openly say they want jihad. But they do. People don’t talk about it, but Israel has been at war with the West Bank this whole time. This has to change. We need to replace Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but I don’t know how you can replace them with anybody until you change the educational system. So we have to get rid of the people who are in the educational system who are radical jihadists, and who are poisoning the minds of the next generation.”

“The next step is to defeat Hamas in such a way that they can never come back.”

– Naomi Ragen

Palestinians, she says, need to be taught the truth about the history of the Jewish people in Israel. “They just don’t know that we have 3,000 years of history here.” She feels that the people who support them in the universities in the United States are likewise ignorant. “The children who are walking through New York City high schools threatening Jewish teachers, they don’t know either. There’s been no education. When people are asked on TikTok if they’ve heard of the Holocaust, they ask, ‘Is it a place? Is it in California?’ We assume a lot of things because we’re from a different generation, but it’s shocking how little people know.”
She thinks outlawing TikTok would be a good thing. “It’s an indoctrination tool, which has been used by the worst possible kind of people to indoctrinate other people in terrible things. Maybe we should just get rid of the internet. I don’t think you can do that, but I do think the next step is to defeat Hamas in such a way that they can never come back. How do we do that? Well, that’s a good question. If we had more support from the United States and its president was supportive of our goals, perhaps we would be able to do this in a more final manner. At this point, probably what’s going to happen is that we’re going to get tired of fighting and we’ll give in and say, OK, let’s make some kind of treaty,” says Ragen. “That will be the worst thing that could happen, because It means another war, another year.”

Until October 7, Ragen says, she was a very strong supporter of Netanyahu. “But Bibi lost me,” she says, “because of what happened on his watch. It was his concept that allowing Hamas to take over Gaza would be better than having a Palestinian state. Only the extreme right wing were against that, and they turned
out to be right.”

19. Yehuda Glick: Messiahs vs. satan is a dangerous mindset

Photo by Nadine Epstein

An American-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi, Yehuda Glick leads the campaign for expanding Jewish access to Jerusalem’s volatile Temple Mount, which he envisions as the world center of peace. “It’s where the kingdom of one God is supposed to be announced,” he says. Glick served in the Knesset for the Likud Party from 2016 to 2019.

“When I zoom in on the situation right now I see that Israeli society is very much divided,” he says. “People refer to themselves as Messiahs and the other side as Satan, and vice versa. Everybody’s sure that they know exactly what’s right and the only problem is the other side. I was hoping that October 7 would cause people to be a little more aware of the diverse society we’re living in. But unfortunately, we see the same arguments that existed before with different pawns on the table. A year ago, it was judicial reform that was dividing us, before that it was corruption. Now it has become the hostages and drafting the religious into the army. There’s always an excuse and it’s always dividing us.”

Until October 7, Glick says, Israel was on a very promising path. “We developed peace with many Arab countries, such as the Emirates and Oman, and there was serious talk about peace with Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.” Now, he says, “all the cards have been spilled on the ground again and we’re at the point where even our friend the United States is hesitating about its friendship with Israel, and our peace treaty with Egypt is at stake.”

“Back 76 years ago, there were two nations here. Neither had a country and the United Nations offered both of them a country. We built a country with a flourishing society, culture, technology, medicine, economy and agriculture—we turned seawater into drinking water, and anything we touched flourished. Unfortunately, our next-door neighbors, the Palestinians, have been spending 76 years blaming Israel and spreading propaganda all over the world and investing a lot of money in terror and hate and incitement. I don’t understand why they’re not investing in their society. When we pulled out of Gaza in 2005, we left the houses there. All they had to do was turn on the water. The world gave them $10 billion. They could’ve had a flourishing economy. They told us it was going to become Singapore. I’ve been to Singapore and Gaza doesn’t resemble Singapore. I’m very frustrated, but I will continue my efforts to live in peace with my brothers in Israel—the citizens of Israel, Jews and non-Jews, religious and nonreligious—and I will continue my efforts to live in peace with our neighbors.”

Israel, says Glick, must continue to move forward. “We have to make sure that no one will have the ability to be able to do something like October 7 ever again,” he says. “And we should do everything we can to defeat this cruelty in the world and show people that it’s not just against Israel, it’s against the whole Western liberal society. So the next step is to win the war. Everyone in Israel has an opinion about exactly how to do it. I don’t. I just know that we have to put every effort we can to bring back our hostages and to defeat the enemy, an enemy with octopus arms.”

“The next step is to win the war. Everyone in Israel has an opinion about exactly how to do it.”

– Rabbi Yehuda Glick

Glick is hopeful that Israel is up to the challenge. “Our history shows that as a Jewish nation our survival was never easy,” he says. “But eventually, in spite of the very difficult history we went through, we always managed to stand up on our feet.”

19. Netzach Brodt: The goal is to survive the “fourth quarter”

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Born in Canada and raised in Israel, Netzach Brodt is an international tax lawyer for a large accounting firm and is currently serving in the reserves. He and his family live in the settlement of Ofra, located about 20 miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. They moved there, he said, because it was an affordable place conveniently located between Jerusalem, where he was working at the time, and Ariel, where his wife attended university.

Brodt is deeply concerned about growing civil strife in Israeli society. “There’s a feeling that we have reached a critical time in the history of Israel and that the situation is fragile,” he says. Twice in the story of the Jewish people, following the reigns of King Solomon and the Hasmonean Queen Shlomtzion, Jewish kingdoms collapsed as they entered the fourth quarter of the first century of their existence, falling into civil wars after having lost touch with their foundational values. Brodt has joined an initiative called The Fourth Quarter, which is working to prevent such a civil war: Its goals are to build a broad alliance of Israelis, focus on forward-thinking solutions rather than victories, and foster a politics of humility.

With greater appreciation for one another, Brodt says, Israelis will know how to overcome the challenges facing them. He’s still inspired by the way people brought supplies and sandwiches from their homes after October 7. “People just came,” he says. “We saw that the differences between different parts of Israel are very small. I’m talking about people. We just need to be able to break through to the politicians. We need to be able to break through these boundaries that we’re always building around ourselves.”

The current government, he says, is benefiting from the fragmentation of Israeli society. “This doesn’t mean that we all have to have the same political views,” he says. “People can still have their views and beliefs and so on, but the bottom line for all of us is, “What are we? What are we doing together as a society?”

Brodt finds the IDF reserve units to be good examples of brotherhood. “Reserve units are unique because people come together from different backgrounds, from different daily routines and different ideologies,” he says. “Yet they stand up for each other, and that’s something we all need to do.”

20. Esther Brodt: Please let us keep what we have

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Esther Brodt is an architect who lives with her husband, Netzach, and their children in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. She grew up in and around Ofra and attended the girls’ school there. Her sister also lives in Ofra, and her parents are ten minutes away by car in another settlement. “It’s pretty close, but you can’t walk there like you can in the city—if you want to stay alive,” she says. Brodt’s message to the Palestinians is: “We don’t want to have to give this back. Give us back the hostages and leave us alone. I don’t need more than what I have. Just give me some quiet.”

“I feel lost,” she says. “I don’t know what the next steps are. I don’t know if changing the government is a good idea or a bad idea. I feel like I cannot trust Bibi, but right now I think he and Israel have the same interests, so I feel safe for the moment.” She doesn’t trust the political left: “It seems that the left and the radical left are not working in the interest of the State of Israel,” which she wants to see retain its Jewish identity. “They would like Israel to be like any other state in the world.”

21. Rinat Galily: Recovering from trauma takes time

Photo by Nadine Epstein

A marriage and family therapist who survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nirim and is now displaced from her home, Galily previously trained Ukrainian psychologists to work with internal refugees who had experienced Russian brutality. “I used to think that we could make peace with Gaza,” she says. “I ran workshops with women from Gaza. We educated young kids and I developed a workshop for their parents about how to communicate better with them. I didn’t see it coming. Some of my patients were slaughtered with their kids. One of the therapists I was mentoring was slaughtered with her family. I could never have imagined that something like this would happen.”

“I would like Israel to come back to its original values of humanity, of caring for each other. I’d like a stable and honest government,” she says. “I’d like to have a government that will reach an arrangement with our neighbors in order to have peace so that everyone can live their own lives with their own people. Europe had two major wars in the 20th century, and nowadays, you can simply drive between France and Germany. I used to be more optimistic. I’m not so much now. I hope my dream will come true in my lifetime.”

“We have so much to heal, and it won’t happen in the next few years,” says Galily. “That’s why I think the best thing is to bring an international force into Gaza to govern, because we’re too wounded to do it. It has to be strong enough to make sure that the Gaza Strip will be good for the people who live there, who are also traumatized. It needs to put everything in order and to fight Islamic extremism so Gazans will be able to live in peace and live their lives and not be threatened by Hamas and other extremists. Then maybe we can live together. But there must be a political solution, not only a military solution. It can’t be that we wipe out everyone. It’s not humane to do it. We have to get rid of Hamas because they’re evil, the kind of evil I learned about when I learned about the Holocaust.”

22. Nadav Salzberger: A Jewish social democracy led by a new generation

Photo courtesy of Nadav Salzberger

Salzberger was a leader of the judicial reform protests and now helps lead demonstrations to free the October 7 hostages and topple the Netanyahu government. He’s also a leader of Change Generation, a social movement focused on connecting young Israelis from across the political and religious spectrums, with the goal of making them realize that the current government doesn’t have a realistic vision for Israel and moving them a step to the left. “I think many young people really feel over the past year and a half that Israel is at a crossroads,” he said. “We need to decide whether Israel’s going to be a liberal democracy—a Jewish democracy, where we have a strong independent judicial system, where we strive to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, where human rights are safeguarded—or whether Israel is going in a direction of a Jewish state that is not democratic and that is run by the Messianic, the Orthodox and the settlers who want to drag us into endless war and isolation.” Salzberger describes himself as a center-left Zionist and a social Democrat: “I believe that Israel, in order to survive, has to be a welfare state, a social democracy that strives for equality in terms of human rights but also economic opportunity.” He is inspired by what he calls the “awakening of a liberal camp that was in deep slumber and felt hopeless and defeated over the last decade. The historic protest movement born from the judicial overhaul attempt is something that, in my opinion, will reshape Israel in years to come.”

Israel needs a constitution as soon as possible, Salzberger says. “There are so many big issues that the founding fathers of Israel left for future generations, such as the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from the army. ‘We don’t have to resolve this now,’ they said, ‘it’s for future generations to solve.’ Well, we are a future generation, and things now have to be decided.” He would like to see a constitution that safeguards both human rights and social rights, and believes there should be some sort of reform of the judicial branch—but not for the same reasons as conservatives. “The judicial branch and the Supreme Court are not defending the weakest people,” he says. “They defend the elites. There aren’t laws that require them to safeguard our social rights in Israel.”

After October 7, one of the first things Change Generation did was to meet with professors, academics and think tank analysts to produce a plan for Israel. “We call it ‘Israel 2030,’ both because we set 2030 for the plan to be fulfilled and because 2030 is a play on the ages 20 to 30.” The plan has 10 clauses, most of them focused on socioeconomic problems. “The first one states that we need a bill of rights, including the right to education, to healthcare, to housing. I view October 7 not only as a military failure, an intelligence failure and a political failure but also as a socioeconomic failure. The institutions of the state were totally unprepared, and the citizens had to step in and save the day,” he says, adding that this was a result of decades of dwindling budgets for social services.

Salzberger wants to see an overhaul of the election system in Israel and thinks the Knesset should be expanded to more than 120 representatives to bring in younger people and “new blood”—and also should include representatives who are elected in regional or semi-regional elections to improve accountability. “There isn’t even a word in Hebrew for accountability,” he says. “Having no direct way for voters to punish or reward elected representatives leads to a very corrupt system and concentrates power in the hands of the largest party.” Israel, he says, needs more checks and balances on power, which could ease tensions between the government and the Supreme Court, as well as a law that limits a prime minister to two terms. He also thinks it could be helpful to spread power by creating a constitutional assembly, outside the purview of the Knesset and the Supreme Court, that has the authority to review the Basic Laws (which currently act as a quasi-constitution) and create a constitution.

Unlike many of his peers, Salzberger does not think the ultra-Orthodox should necessarily be drafted into the military. He’d prefer to see them perform mandatory public service in education, agriculture, social work or another field. “I don’t think serving in the army would be good for the ultra-Orthodox, who are trying to preserve the nature and character of their community,” he says, nor does he think it would be good for the army. “If a third of the soldiers are ultra-Orthodox Jews, there’ll be fewer women in positions of power within the military.” Salzberger supports the establishment of a full Palestinian state but doesn’t think it will be possible for years due to the radicalization of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. He thinks it is essential for Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and create an alliance of moderate states in the Middle East against Iran and Hamas. “I think that’s something that can be reached with an Israeli government that says it does not want to control Gaza’s civilians and does not want the West Bank.” Israel, he says, “must deal with its own fanatics.” An Israeli professor, Salzberger says, has coined the term “sectocracy” to describe Israel at this juncture. “It means that you have different groups such as the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox, each of them only worrying about their own interests and trying to take a big piece of a shrinking budget but not thinking of Israel as a whole.”

It’s not easy to be a center-left Zionist at this point in time, says Salzberger. “Left-leaning Zionist Israelis are essentially fighting three wars right now—the war against Hamas, the war against our awful government and the war for the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state worldwide,” he says. “Never in any previous conflict has whether Israel should exist been discussed. And now it is. This is one of the worst consequences of the war and we will see the effects of this for years to come. This has highlighted for me that Israel is the only home for the Jews as a nation, the only place in the world Jews can have self-determination, not without being persecuted because, as you can see, we got massacred for being Jewish, but it’s the only place we have,” he says. “I have a lot of friends who are talking about leaving the country out of despair. I tell them that things can get better, that the nation has survived the worst, that sometimes out of the deepest crisis things can take a turn for the better.”

23. Evyatar Lipkin: A Jewish libertarian democracy led by a new generation

Photo courtesy of Evyatar Lipkin

Evyatar Lipkin, who grew up in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, is a recent graduate of the master’s program in political science and history at Hebrew University. He wants to go into politics but has yet to start a position as an adviser to a Likud Knesset member because he is serving in the military reserves. “A lot of people say that democracy in Israel has never been more in danger,” says Lipkin. “I don’t believe that democracy in Israel has ever been that strong. We still live in a very militaristic society and we still have a lot of emergency guidelines that are always active and that are understandable considering the current situation.”

Lipkin believes that reforming Israel’s Supreme Court would strengthen the country’s democracy by making the court “more balanced and more clear and open to criticism,” although he did not support the Netanyahu government’s recent judicial reform effort, which he describes as “like a bull in a china shop.” And although Lipkin voted for Netanyahu many times and thinks he’s “the best politician Israel has ever seen,” he feels it’s time for a new leader. “Bibi symbolizes a time period of Israeli politics that is very toxic and very unhealthy,” he says. “The problem with Bibi is that he thinks he knows what is best for Israel. I feel like he did a lot to heat up the temperature of political dialogue in Israel.” Lipkin says Netanyahu is “an extremely savvy political operator. But it always smells authoritarian when there is someone in control for way too long. We don’t have term limits, which is something that is going to have to change.” Lipkin hopes Netanyahu will leave politics in good health without destroying any more of his legacy, but he doubts that will happen. Instead he sees “a war for the throne and the Court” looming and has nightmares about the many election cycles he expects after the war. He wants the Knesset threshold [the percentage of votes a party needs to receive to make it into parliament] to be lowered “because there are many parties on the sidelines who are just begging to get inside. It will create a lot of chaos, but it will help us to form more coalitions.”

As a libertarian, Lipkin wants to cut spending (he also has nightmares about a recession of “biblical proportions” after the war) and minimize the presence of the government in civilian life. He also supports the separation of church and state: “It’s not the business of the religious institutions to lead the country. Their job is to be religious leaders for the communities, for people who look to them for guidance.” He has lost patience with specific sections of the population “who rarely contribute to the common good.” In other words, he wants the ultra-Orthodox to serve in the army. As a religious Jew, he has a lot of respect for religious study; however, he says, “I don’t have respect for people who, excuse my language, sit on their ass while other people are putting their lives on the line for them. I do believe there is a metaphysical value to prayers, but God commands us to protect ourselves with weapons and to fight, not just to sit and study.”

Lipkin says he’s extremely optimistic about the future. “There is no one in Israel right now who won’t say to every single one of the current Knesset club of 120 that they need to go home,” he says. Noting that the political class in Israel has long been stagnant, he adds, “There are so many young people who are waiting on the sidelines for their turn…we are excited to work together.” He’s personally looking forward to shaping policy “by sitting down and logically talking with people who have different ideas to reach a common-good conclusion.“ Lipkin believes geopolitics are central to Israel’s future and wants to see the United States sponsor a strong Middle Eastern coalition against Iran, Russia and China.

As a religious Jew, he believes Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people and that they shouldn’t have to share it. Nor is he convinced that most Palestinians in the West Bank want a separate state given the level of corruption that exists there. “I have so much sympathy for them,“ he says. “The irony of living in too-dense areas in so-called settlements is that half of the buildings are being built by Palestinians. Most of the construction work in Israel, in general, is being done by Palestinians.” Both of his parents speak Arabic, having worked in intelligence. “They like to sit with the construction workers and talk with them. The amount of suffering Palestinians go through because of the corruption in their government is really heartbreaking. You can’t get anything if you don’t have friends in high places, and there is no chance of social mobility. It’s amazing how many Palestinians are trying to move to Egypt, or the States or Europe.” Yet because Lipkin is against “displacement [expelling Palestinians from the West Bank],” he believes a two-state solution is, in theory, the only way to solve the conflict. “But I can’t for the life of me see it happening,” he says, “just because of how radical the Palestinians are. The fact that every time you go out of your house, and you see a car coming up to you, you think to yourself, are there Palestinians inside? Am I going to be run over? Not only in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. Even when you’re in Jerusalem, and you’re standing with a coffee in the train station, and you see someone who looks Palestinian coming up to you, you ask yourself, am I going to get stabbed?”

Lipkin says no one he knows questions the legitimacy of the war but that it’s been going on for far too long. “We should have gone in strong, hard and fast,” he says. “Israel had a lot of political capital in the beginning, we should have cashed it all in. There would have been a lot more casualties, which is something that is very painful for me to say, a lot more soldiers would have died if we just went straight in.” Lipkin says Israelis feel like they are living in the movie Groundhog Day. “Every morning we wake up and see on TV an upcoming cease-fire agreement with Hamas for the return of the hostages. We’re just waiting for a response from Hamas. Then five days later we’ve said no to all the terms and we’re keeping the fighting going. And then the day after, discussions are being held in Egypt. And this keeps happening every single day.” Lipkin has a lot of respect for what President Biden did at the beginning of the war. “He put the aircraft carriers outside. He stood strongly behind Israel.” But he believes that if Trump is reelected, he’ll give Israel a month to do whatever it needs. “He’ll say, ‘You can make the picture horrible but you need to finish it in a month.’ I believe Trump is extremely hard, and has the correct vision for the Middle East, which is that the political climate here does not depend on the Palestinian question. It depends on the Iranian question.”

24. Ran Baratz: The left is misguided and radical

Ran Baratz was director of communications for the prime minister’s office under Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016 and 2017, teaches military strategy for the IDF and is the founding editor of the Hebrew-language conservative news site Mida. Baratz says he now has a different vision for Israel than he had two years ago. “I thought we had an all-encompassing kind of traditional identity being formed and that in the end, we would all converge—some would be more or less religious or more right or left—but we would have the mutual basis that we are all Jews with a good sense of tradition.” But then came the judicial reform and protests. He blames the government for its heavy-handedness and the left for creating mass hysteria. “You’d have to go back to the 1930s before the State of Israel was formed to get to those levels of panic and animosity. In the 1930s, we were on the brink of a civil war between socialist Zionism and revisionist Zionism. It became so full of passion and hate. The levels of hostility and sectarianism that we now have give me pause.”

Baratz says that while the Orthodox have always built high walls around themselves, the protests made him realize that “part of the Israeli left is also stuck in its own world. They also have their own institutions and don’t see anyone other than themselves.” As the left keeps radicalizing, he says, the Orthodox become more defensive in response: “Their instinct is always to make the walls higher when they are attacked.” Baratz believes it’s time for a new government. “We’re in a war, so the two main focuses are economics and security. And the current government is doing a terrible job in both,” he says. “I love Netanyahu. The last two years have demolished his record, but historically he had many achievements. The first term economically was incredible, later terms were very successful in terms of international relations, less for the economy. But it’s like when Neville Chamberlain resigned early in World War II and said, ‘I’m good for peace. I’m not good for war.’ I think there might be something to that. I think in peace Chamberlain was better than Churchill, but for war Churchill was better. Now Netanyahu likes to compare himself to Churchill, but Netanyahu is better in peace. And when we are in a crisis, we need something different. He’s been in power a very long time.” There aren’t many good alternatives to Netanyahu, he says. “Most Israelis agree that the old generation, these 60-plus politicians, are not doing a good job. We probably need to have younger leaders that start over.” Baratz sees a few younger leaders who are smart and qualified emerging in the Likud and from the Knesset. But he’s not optimistic that the middle-rank politicians will make good leaders, because they are focused on unity, and in politics division is necessary, he says. He thinks the protest movements on the left will produce some leaders but says “they are terrible and will make poor politicians.”

Baratz believes it is possible to forge peace without a Palestinian state because “the Saudi government doesn’t care about the Palestinians,” he says. “The Saudi population likes the Palestinians, and in the conflict, they take their side, but the Saudi leadership has only one interest, Iran, which for them is an existential threat. So if you ask me, the only one pushing the Palestinian question into this mix is the American administration.” This is unwise at this time, he says. It reflects President Biden’s “complete misunderstanding of the situation on the ground and in the Middle East.” The left in Israel, Baratz argues, has always maintained that peace in the region won’t occur until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved. This kind of diplomacy has failed, and he agrees with Netanyahu that there can be peace without the establishment of a Palestinian state. That will happen when the Palestinians are ready to make it happen, he says. “When they want peace, it will be that easy.” Baratz sees a difference between “Arabs living in Israel” and Palestinians. “A talented Arab can also be a very good Hebrew author, a poet, scientist, whatever, just like Jews in the diaspora, who worked in their national surroundings and did intellectual work in their national languages of German, French or English,” he says. “So it will be the same for Arab Israelis. They still have their own identity, but they’re basically part of Israeli culture.”

He is worried about looming geopolitical threats. “We have reached a point that the rest of the world is going to encounter in the coming decade or two, because of the rise of China and Russia and the Shiite part of the Arab world. They’re working together, growing, rising and militarizing at a very fast rate. I’m saying something that’s unpopular in Israel, that the war in Gaza is less important than rebuilding the IDF,” says Baratz. “I think that the likelihood of a regional war is growing every year. We need to rebuild for a kind of war that the IDF is not prepared for. They were under a false conception for two decades that conventional war in this world is over. Most Israelis agree with me that what we need now is not political unity for the sake of unity; what we need is real reform in the Israeli state. The machine is not working. We are reaching an existential period in history and we have got to get this machine going.”

The executive and legislative branches, Baratz says, are hampered by the Israeli Supreme Court, which turns any kind of change into a legal issue. The judicial function overpowers everything, he says, which is “almost insane from a democratic point of view.” The judicial reform “was about taking away that power” from the Court. He says the Court began to challenge the power of the other branches of government beginning in 1977, when the right first won an Israeli election, and that since 1995, the Court’s power has grown unchecked. “It’s corrosion in our democracy,” he says. “They never lose one iota of power that they assign to themselves, only the executive branch loses power. And so we are in a crisis.”

25. Sally Abed: Palestinians & Jews can stand together

Photo by Nadine Epstein

Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and one of the leaders of Standing Together, a movement of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, was recently elected to Haifa’s city council. She thinks it’s time to “move toward the place where we build a state for everyone, one that gives liberty and freedom and safety and refuge to both nationalities that are here.” But it’s much more than that, she explains. “We are just so consumed with surviving and fighting for a right to not die that we don’t dare to dream about lives that are prosperous and joyful. We live in one of the most beautiful spots on earth,” she says. “I want to be happy. I want to be safe, economically and personally. And I want everyone around me to prosper in a country that has a state and a government that exists to serve its people and their safety.”

When people say safety, she notes, it’s gotten reduced to national security. “Right now, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis believe we have to control five million people and be wary of 20 percent of our own citizens to be safe,” she says. “I want us to be past that. I see that not just as a Palestinian. I see that as an Israeli citizen. I want us to be past the trauma that was inflicted on October 7, not just, but mainly, on Jewish Israelis, and past the unfathomable suffering of the people on the other side,” she says. “I want us to have an understanding that both peoples have to prosper in order for all of us to prosper.”

Standing Together doesn’t provide models for a two-state solution or a confederation, says Abed. Its job as a grassroots movement is to help Israelis begin to imagine the idea of safety and security and a prosperous future. “Now we have political leadership in Israel that is not willing to even talk about these things and is actually systematically preventing them from entering the political imagination of Israelis,” she says. “If you look at the West Bank, we have the same problem on the Palestinian side. Palestinian political leadership has systematically destroyed any options: Over the past 20 years alternative leaders have either been incarcerated, exiled or killed.” This stifling of threats to the status quo, she says, may be “the most effective collaboration between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”

Abed says she and other Standing Together leaders have studied and learned from previous Israeli peace movements and are mobilizing people under the group’s signature purple tent, a color chosen because it isn’t associated with either the Israeli right or left, and is also the international color of the feminist movement. “We bring people together in person again and again and again,” she says. “It’s not just a one-time thing or a series of meetings to bridge the gaps or narratives. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build a new community and create a new culture of solidarity with new terminology.” The group builds local movements by advocating for a livable wage, climate justice and other issues.

The story of Israel is a dual one: “We’re literally the only society that has Palestinians and Israelis who live together,” she says. Abed’s personal story reflects this duality, as well as that of three generations of Israel’s Arabs. She grew up in the western Galilee Arab village of Mi’ilya. Her grandmother was illiterate, her parents educated civil servants.

Abed, who is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English, was able to attend college in the United States. It wasn’t until she returned to Israel and joined Standing Together that she began to take ownership not only of her own narrative as a woman and as a Palestinian but as a member of Israeli society. “I think that’s one of the most important things we can do as Palestinians, because we don’t feel like we have ownership.” In Abed’s assessment, her generation of Israel’s Palestinians is unique: “I’m not saying this lightly—we are the only ones who can actually imagine a new collective and the only ones who can be the leaders for peace.”

Over the past year, she and Alon-Lee Green, Standing Together’s Jewish Israeli codirector, traveled widely throughout the United States, where she found herself in disagreement with protesters who rejected any vision of Palestinian-Israeli cooperation and anything short of the outright elimination of Israel. She says their black-and-white thinking erases her point of view. “It’s not radical to condemn the status quo,” she says. “The most radical thing you can do is actually try to build an alliance and change the status quo.”

“Obviously,” she adds, “we could argue for why Israel is a settler colonial project, but how would those arguments convince anyone who is not already convinced?” More Palestinians in Israel now use this language of colonialism and, as a result, are isolating themselves further from Israeli society. “There’s a lot of work to do in Palestinian society as well as in Israeli society,” she says.

Thank you to Moment’s Israel Editor Eetta Prince-Gibson and to Yoram Black for their help with this project.