The Hamas attacks in October 2023 that started the war in Gaza shocked Israeli and international analysts. How had Hamas managed to carry out such a large and devastating operation, given Israel’s formidable military and intelligence capacities? The events of Oct. 7 certainly marked a failure for Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, but they were also a political failure. That day was the deadly culmination of Israel’s refusal, over the previous two decades, to engage meaningfully with the Palestinians. This catastrophic failure of policy was strengthened by the perception, widespread among Israeli Jews since the early 2000s, that the conflict with the Palestinians could never be solved — only managed.
To understand the political and strategic failures that led to Oct. 7, the rationale behind Israel’s ongoing annihilatory campaign in Gaza and the broad support for that campaign among Jewish Israelis, we need to examine the state’s political and ideological landscape, with a focus on two defining questions: How and why did mainstream Israeli politics shift over the last half century from the center-left to the far right? And what role do the political parties that represent Israel’s 2 million Arab-Palestinian citizens play in national politics?
Likud, Israel’s mainstream right-wing party now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, has dominated Israeli politics since 1977. In that year Menachem Begin led the party to a historic victory over Labor, which had governed Israel without interruption since the state’s founding in 1948. Likud’s victory was an earthquake in Israel politics; its reverberations are still felt today. The party traces its origins to the pre-state Revisionist Zionism movement and its associated political party, founded and led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Polish Jew who was sympathetic to some elements of Benito Mussolini’s brand of fascism during the early 1930s. Jabotinsky espoused a nationalist, territorially maximalist, economically liberal ideology; he is perhaps best known for his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” in which he outlined his violent political philosophy.
In the essay, Jabotinsky posited that, since every native population resists its colonizers, the Zionist settlers must rely on military might and surround themselves with an “iron wall” until the final surrender of Palestine’s Arabs. A political settlement could be reached with the “natives” when they “no longer [have] any hope of getting rid of us,” he wrote. But while Jabotinsky’s Revisionists differed from David Ben-Gurion’s Labor party in many respects — for example, the Revisionists espoused economic liberalism while Labor’s economic worldview was predicated on the establishment of a centrally controlled socialist economy — Labor’s views on the need to dominate and subdue the Palestinian population were, as we shall see, not significantly different from those of the Revisionists, some of whom formed the Herut (Liberty) party in 1948 that later merged with Likud.
Begin and Likud unseated Labor in 1977 by appealing to Israel’s Mizrahim — Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin — who had been economically and socially marginalized by Israel’s Ashkenazi, Labor-led establishment. To this day, the Likud-led political right is strongest in what Israelis call the “periphery,” the small, economically disadvantaged towns in the south and in the border regions where the population is disproportionately Mizrahi. In Israeli parlance “the periphery” describes not only the geographical location of those small towns but also the primarily Mizrahi, working-class voters who are “peripheral” to Labor’s traditional base of middle-class, educated, Ashkenazi Jews. Netanyahu has created a cult of personality among those voters, even though he is Ashkenazi — as was Begin and every other leader of Likud.
Demographic changes over the past three decades have presented Netanyahu with a mix of opportunities and challenges. The Mizrahi-Ashkenazi divide is no longer as salient as it once was — socioeconomic gaps have narrowed and mixed marriages have become more common — but Mizrahi Jews are still overrepresented among Likud’s voters and within the political right more broadly. Their emotional loyalty generally to Likud and specifically to Netanyahu, who has created a cult of personality that is often called “Bibi-ism,” after the prime minister’s nickname, is derived from two factors — the patronage system Likud built during the 1970s in the periphery, whereby the party doled out jobs in return for loyalty, and the grievance politics that are the heavy legacy of decades of discrimination at the hands of the historically Labor-supporting Ashkenazi establishment.
The political right also capitalized on the messianic religious fervor that spread through Israel following its decisive victory and territorial expansion in the June 1967 war, often called the Six-Day War. A distinct religious Zionist constituency existed within Israeli society well before 1967, but the war boosted its popularity significantly, infusing it with a radical messianism. Since 1967, this highly ideological constituency has accrued considerable power disproportionate to its size. Today it is overrepresented in certain military units, in the Knesset, in the government, in key national agencies and in certain elements of Israel’s sprawling security apparatus. Herzi Halevi, the chief of the general staff of the army, is a religious settler, as are two of the 15 judges on the Supreme Court and several members of the Cabinet.
Not all settlers are religious nationalists. Some are what Israelis call “quality of life” settlers, often secular, who are attracted to the affordable housing and quality public schools available in suburban-feeling settlements located just a few minutes’ drive from their jobs in Israel’s major population centers. But the leaders of the religious-national settler movement are the most vocal proponents of settlement expansion. Subsidized by successive Israeli governments, Labor and Likud alike, 620,000 Jewish settlers now live in the West Bank, including some 200,000 in East Jerusalem, which Israel formally annexed in 1980. The Palestinian population of the occupied territories — around 3 million in the West Bank and 2 million in Gaza — remains disenfranchised.
The political scientist Raffaella Del Sarto identifies the political consensus that emerged after the 1977 Likud victory as “neo-Revisionist.” Neo-Revisionism capitalizes on two factors: the resentment of Mizrahim, now over half the Jewish population, toward the historical Ashkenazi elite, and the public’s reinvigorated support for religiously inspired territorial maximalism. While the vast majority of Israeli Jews, secular and religious, do not aspire to settle in the occupied territories, they are also unwilling to relinquish Israel’s control over the territory. Their reasoning is based partly on an emotional attachment to the biblical holy sites and partly on security concerns. Geopolitically pessimistic, neo-Revisionism takes Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” thesis a step further by arguing that the Palestinians cannot be defeated and thus the conflict can only be managed — never resolved. Unlike Jabotinsky, those who subscribe to this worldview argue that peace negotiations are inherently futile, irrespective of the Palestinian leadership’s position. Israel, they say, is therefore doomed to live forever by the sword.
The Zionist left’s dramatic electoral decline and gradual replacement by hawkish centrist and center-right parties is one of the most striking manifestations of the spread of neo-Revisionism. In 1992 Labor, the party of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, won 44 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Meretz, the progressive Zionist party to Labor’s left, won 12 seats. By 2022, Labor’s representation had declined to just four seats, while Meretz failed to win the minimum number of votes to pass the threshold for Knesset representation. Centrist parties like Yesh Atid, led by Yair Lapid, have emerged to replace the liberal-left parties. They maintain some of the left’s core commitments to social liberalism and secularism while adopting militaristic and ethnonational stances that are particularly manifested in a hawkish position toward the Palestinians.
The rise of the right decimated the once prominent peace camp. Israel’s rich and varied left-wing tradition predates the establishment of the state, but the peace camp, which aspired to resolve both the Israeli-Palestinian and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict by returning the territories that had been captured in 1967, only emerged as a mass movement after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. That summer, tens of thousands massed in Tel Aviv’s central square to protest the Israeli army’s failure to prevent the massacre of Palestinians committed by Israel’s Christian allies at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut. It was during this time that the grassroots organization Peace Now emerged, with prominent voices like the author Amos Oz articulating its aims. To be sure, most Israeli “peaceniks” were staunch Zionists. They wanted peace for demographic rather than ideological reasons — that is, they believed that separating from the Palestinian population in the occupied territories was necessary to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority within its 1948 borders. Nevertheless, their vision prioritized peace over territorial expansion, in contrast to the expansionist, geopolitically pessimistic vision of the neo-Revisionists.
Yitzhak Rabin, then head of Labor, led the peace camp to electoral victory in 1992. Rabin’s coalition, composed of Labor and Meretz, the party furthest left on the Zionist spectrum, came up five seats shy of a majority in the Knesset. Five days after the elections, Rabin phoned the leader of the binational Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE), who was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to ask for his support. The two met soon after. At that time there was a long-standing implicit taboo against including the parties that represent Palestinian citizens of Israel in a governing coalition. The Palestinian parties, meanwhile, had never officially endorsed a mainstream Zionist party. Rabin and the leaders of the Palestinian parties in Israel chose to bend rather than break these taboos by opting for an unofficial confidence and supply agreement rather than formal inclusion in government. In practical terms, this meant that the Palestinian parties would vote with the governing coalition on key issues but without actually joining the government.
Rabin made up the shortfall of seats in his coalition by inviting Shas, the party founded in 1984 to represent ultra-Orthodox Mizrahim, to join his government. Soon after his government was seated Rabin opened negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Whether Rabin intended to establish a meaningfully independent Palestinian state is a topic of ongoing debate, but his government was certainly the most progressive in Israel’s history, passing the quasi-constitutional Basic Laws that enshrined the country’s democratic character. When Shas quit Rabin’s coalition in 1993, after two of its members were forced by a Supreme Court ruling to resign on corruption charges, the Palestinian parties propped up his government by voting with it in the Knesset. In representing both Israel’s peace camp and the Labor-led, veteran Zionist establishment, Rabin breached political barriers: For the first time, Palestinian participation in government was legitimized, opening the door to restructuring ethnic relations within Israel. For the first time, national equality — within Israel, in the form of equal civil rights for Palestinians, and outside Israel, in the form of a Palestinian state — seemed possible. That hope died on Nov. 4, 1995, when Yigal Amir, a far-right activist, assassinated Rabin.
The sense of disillusionment that followed the Second Intifada had a profound effect on the Israeli left. For Jews across the Zionist political spectrum, the breakdown of the Oslo Accords that accompanied the suicide bombings was proof that peace negotiations were futile and that the Palestinian problem could be only managed, not resolved. Many who had identified with the peace camp abandoned their hopes for a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since then, and especially since Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, the popular political discourse has degraded markedly. Today, previously acceptable liberal political positions regarding the Palestinians — hotly debated and fiercely opposed, to be sure, but acceptable nonetheless — have become anathema. Polls consistently show that a majority of Israeli Jews identify as right-wing. “Leftist” has become an insult on the street and in the Knesset, where politicians routinely hurl the word at one another as an accusation or a slur, with the targets of the accusation often responding by denying their leftism in a reflexive, defensive manner.
Major government-sponsored awards for professional accomplishment in academia or the arts have been withheld from people who are known to hold left-wing views, such as supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Jewish-Israeli leftist activists, alongside many Arab-Palestinian citizens, are increasingly viewed in mainstream Israeli circles as fifth columnists. At the same time, far-right nongovernmental organizations have launched high-profile smear campaigns against Arab and left-wing activists in Israel. The two most prominent are Regavim, a pro-settler group co-founded by Bezalel Smotrich, and Im Tirtzu, a quasi-fascist extraparliamentary group that uses the legal system to pursue leftists in politics and academia. These organizations are well funded by right-wing Jewish organizations in the U.S. and are very close to the center of power. They provide support for far-right parliamentarians and ministers by drafting policy briefs, conducting research and even carrying out government decisions as contractors.
Analysis of contemporary Israeli politics should start here — by acknowledging that the Israeli left, which was once the country’s largest and most dominant political group, is now a marginalized political minority that has been almost completely delegitimized.
Before we move on to the parties that represent Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, there are two additional Jewish constituencies to examine. These are the ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredim (“those who fear God”), recognizable for their distinctive modest dress, ascetic religiosity and insular lifestyle, and the roughly 1 million people who immigrated from the former Soviet Union after 1991. Both groups are now aligned with the center-right and far-right parties for complex reasons.
A 2010 survey showed that approximately 1 million Jews from the former Soviet Union were living in Israel, the vast majority of whom identify as both secular and right-wing. Since their arrival in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have supported Likud, the center-right (now defunct) Kadima party and, since 2009, the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) party led by Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian-speaking Israeli Jew who was born in Moldova. Israelis from the former Soviet Union oppose the religious parties partly because the rabbinate, which controls personal status laws, often refuses to recognize their Jewishness. There have been many high-profile cases of the rabbinate refusing to bury a soldier killed in action because his Soviet-born mother was not Jewish or to perform a marriage ceremony in cases where the Jewishness of the bride or groom was in dispute. In the Soviet Union these people had carried national ID cards that specified their nationality as Jewish and many had experienced serious antisemitism, both institutional and social. To be told after immigrating to the state of the Jews that the rabbinate didn’t see them as Jews sparked huge resentment, which brought political consequences.
The rabbinate is controlled by the ultra-Orthodox, who are Israel’s fastest-growing community. They, too, have seen significant ideological changes and rapid demographic growth in recent years. Shas, the political party that represents ultra-Orthodox Mizrahim, and United Torah Judaism, which represents ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim, have become increasingly important coalition partners for Netanyahu as he tries to maintain his grip on power while the centrist parties refuse to join his coalition. In return for their support, the prime minister provides financial subsidies for yeshivas, political power for high-ranking rabbis and, most significantly and controversially, exemption from military service.
Traditionally, the ultra-Orthodox rejected political Zionism for religious reasons, believing that only the Messiah could bring about a Jewish state and that Jews were a religious group but not a national group. That attitude has changed over the past 30 years or so; today the Haredim have an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with Zionism. Haredim have benefited from the state by trading political support for influence over communal and national religious issues. When invited to join a governing coalition to make up the necessary majority of Knesset seats, the Haredim usually demand — and receive — subsidies for housing and education as well as various concessions, like a ban on public transportation on holy days and an exemption from military conscription. The latter has been a consistent source of tension between religious and secular Israeli Jews, who feel they are made to carry an unfair burden. The issue of conscription triggered a political crisis from 2019 to 2022, with five successive elections failing to bring any one party a decisive victory. Currently Netanyahu’s government is once again under threat, with his Haredi coalition partners threatening to pull out if the government enforces the Supreme Court ruling, handed down in June, that the army must expand general conscription to include ultra-Orthodox men.
Despite their resistance to military conscription and their historic ambivalence about the establishment of a secular Jewish state in the absence of the Messiah, significant segments of the Haredi community have shifted toward ethnonationalism in recent years. While this community’s leaders were once open to forging pragmatic alliances with anyone who would preserve its interests, including the liberal-left Zionist parties, today they are ideologically aligned with the right-wing parties. Some analysts continue to stress the community’s pragmatism but there is clear evidence of an ethnoreligious, national awakening within it, especially among its youth. Indeed, groups within the Haredi community have helped prop up Jewish supremacists like National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
While there are many reasons for this ideological transformation, there is little doubt that the neo-Revisionist, religious-national synthesis played a significant role. That said, it is important to emphasize the Haredi community’s political and religious diversity. Large segments within it maintain an ambivalent and in some cases oppositional attitude toward Zionism. While its Ashkenazi and Mizrahi constituencies tend to vote as unified blocs, they make up one of Israel’s most ideologically vibrant communities.
About 2 million (or 20%) of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian Arabs. They are the descendants of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants who remained within the borders of the state of Israel after its establishment in 1948. Collectively, they make up a dynamic, diverse constituency — at times united over shared interests as a disenfranchised minority and at times torn by internal ideological, interpersonal, strategic and tactical differences. This community can be divided into three main ideological streams — communist, nationalist and Islamist. A minority of integrationists have joined Zionist parties: Meretz, Labor and Likud have all had Arab-Palestinian candidates on their list. Until the 1990s, when the government ended limitations on political expression for Palestinian citizens of Israel, the binational, Arab-Jewish Israeli Communist Party was the only means by which they could organize and express their national identity. The poet Mahmoud Darwish was active in the Communist Party in the 1960s.
In the 1990s, the so-called Oslo Spring that followed the famous handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn had a lasting impact on the Palestinian community’s politics and on its relationship with the state. Liberal reforms allowed new parties and civil society organizations to form, providing formal expression to nascent ideological streams. This included the nationalist grouping. The National Democratic Alliance, widely known in Israel by its Hebrew acronym Balad, demands recognition for the Palestinians as a minority with special, collective rights, while the Islamist parties promote religious autonomy for Palestinian Muslims.
While the divisions within the Palestinian community are primarily ideological, there are also notable generational and geographical divides. The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE), known by the Hebrew acronym Hadash and the Arabic name al-Jabha, identifies as binational, non-Zionist and socialist. Party rules specify that the leader must be Palestinian, while the second parliamentary seat is reserved for a Jewish Israeli. The DFPE is the only predominantly Palestinian party that receives a significant number of Jewish votes. But the party has alienated a large proportion of progressive Palestinian youth with the inability of its leaders — mostly older “ammos” or “uncles” — to move past Cold War binaries. The support still lent by some of the DFPE’s leadership to the Assad regime because the Syrian Baathist party is nominally revolutionary socialist, for example, has alienated many young Palestinians.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Palestinian Communist Party in Israel, like most communist parties around the world, shifted away from ideological Marxist-Leninism toward an identity that focused more on nationalism — i.e., Palestinian national rights — even as it continued to advocate for core socialist values like workers’ rights. The 1990s were a hopeful decade for Israel, including its Palestinian citizens. Those years brought economic mobility, a rapidly rising number of first-generation Palestinian-Israeli university graduates, the establishment of dozens of new civil society organizations that advocated for the rights of Palestinian citizens, increased contact with Israeli-Jewish society and, of course, genuine prospects for peace and reconciliation after the signing of the Oslo peace agreement.
The Second Intifada killed that hope. On Oct. 1, 2000, Palestinian citizens of Israel organized demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied territories. At a large demonstration in the north of Israel police opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing 13, wounding hundreds and arresting thousands — all Palestinian citizens of Israel. The October 2000 Events, as they are now called, were a collective show of unity and organizational capacity among Palestinian citizens, but they were also a watershed moment in minority-majority relations, marking the reversal of the political gains the community made in the 1990s as well as its loss of faith in the state and its institutions. In the Knesset the community’s frustration and disappointment was reflected by its voter turnout rate, which declined steadily and steeply from 75% in 1999 to 53.4% in 2009.
In 2006, at the end of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian leadership in Israel codified the community’s political demands in “Vision Documents.” The documents defined ideological common denominators, emphasized the colonial nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, envisioned an end to ethnic hierarchies within Israel, and called for cultural and linguistic autonomy for the Palestinian minority. Since then, Palestinian parliamentarians — representing a largely disgruntled, disillusioned constituency and operating within Israel’s increasingly neo-Revisionist atmosphere — find themselves stuck on the margins as perennial, unwanted outsiders while the political arena continues to move further and further to the right.
In 2014, Palestinian politics experienced a sudden resurgence after the Knesset voted to raise the electoral threshold for legislative representation from 2% to 3.25%. The initiative came from Avigdor Liberman, the leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party and a notorious racist, who was trying to keep the small Palestinian parties out of the Knesset. But the plan backfired. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the DFPE, persuaded the leaders of the small Palestinian parties, which represent a broad spectrum of ideologies that includes Islamists, secular Palestinian nationalists and socialists, to form a single, unified electoral list called the Joint List (JL). Under Odeh’s charismatic leadership, the JL surged in popularity. It won 13 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, breaking the record for the total number of seats won by Arab parties. Palestinian voter turnout increased while the number of Palestinians voting for predominantly Jewish parties decreased compared with the previous (2013) election. In 2020, in the midst of Israel’s political crisis, the JL surged again, winning 15 seats. The scenario was unprecedented: For an admittedly short time, the second-largest party in Israel’s parliament was Arab-Palestinian.
Israel’s 2019-22 electoral crisis, with five successive elections unable to break a 50-50 deadlock between the right and the centrist parties, reveals much about Israel’s internal ideological, religious, tribal and ethnic boundaries. But it also reveals much about its common denominators.
The crisis saw the political landscape split roughly evenly along a pro- and anti-Netanyahu axis, superseding traditional left-right divides. Prominent figures from Israel’s neo-Revisionist right defected to the newly formed “anything but Bibi” camp — a strange amalgam that included Yamina (a far-right Religious-Zionist party), Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, the center-right Blue and White (led by a former IDF chief of staff), Labor and Meretz. The only thing these parties had in common was the desire to see Netanyahu removed from the prime minister’s office, while they had various reasons for wanting to see the back of the long-serving Likud leader.
Despite the JL’s strong showing, its leaders’ willingness to make significant ideological compromises for the sake of unseating Netanyahu, and the considerable electoral repercussions associated with triggering yet another election cycle, the “anything but Bibi” camp could not agree to form a government backed by the JL. The Zionist taboo against bringing Palestinian parties into a governing coalition was stronger than their desire to wrest control of the government from Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners.
The ideological gap between the camps was only bridged when the Islamists defected from the JL and distanced themselves from the rest of the Palestinian leadership by dropping the demand to establish an independent Palestinian state, omitting all reference to a Palestinian national identity and focusing solely on the community’s internal, material and civic issues. In essence, the Islamist party — the United Arab List — sought to mimic the communitarian, pragmatic and transactional aspects of the ultra-Orthodox community’s relationship with power. This is how the amalgam of parties that were united primarily by their opposition to Netanyahu managed to cobble together a fragile governing coalition with the Islamists and break the three-year electoral stalemate. Media outlets reported this event as a breakthrough and a precedent — the first time an Israeli governing coalition included a Palestinian political party. But the coalition crumbled within a year over internal disagreements, which is unsurprising, given their ideological differences. Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022. He now heads Israel’s most extreme, and most religious, government.
It is easy to forget that Israel was already in turmoil before Oct. 7. Throughout 2023 the country was gripped by large weekly protests against Netanyahu’s plans to end the independence of Israel’s judiciary by putting it under parliamentary control. The protests against the judicial reform were de facto a continuation of Israel’s 2019-22 electoral crisis, but on the streets rather than in the Knesset. Week after week the protesters, who subscribed to the “anything but Bibi” camp, mounted remarkably audacious, well-organized, persistent demonstrations. In addition to the weekly protests, they blocked highways, disrupted public events and called general labor strikes all over the country.
While media coverage focused on the centrifugal forces ripping Israel apart, this movement also illustrates the remarkable consensus permeating the Jewish-Israeli majority. The tens of thousands of Israeli flags that were flown at the largest demonstrations turned into their most notable and telling symbol, signifying that, above all, participants viewed themselves as protectors of the (ethno)national interest. The movement’s leadership, very much from the Ashkenazi liberal establishment, consistently excluded Israel’s Palestinian politicians from speaking at the demonstrations — as well as the small but vocal antioccupation left. Their refusal to widen the tent for all Israelis who opposed Netanyahu and his government mirrored the “anything but Bibi” camp’s failure to end the electoral crisis by including the JL in an alternative government. To paraphrase the famous Israeli diplomat and politician Abba Eban, who in 1973 said the Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to make peace, the liberal Israeli establishment has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to oust Netanyahu and the far right by allying with the Palestinian political leadership that represents 20% of Israel’s citizens.
Protest activity has recently resumed but on a much smaller scale. This time the protesters are focusing on the demand that Netanyahu secure a deal for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. But as the past five years show, while political contestation within Israel is fierce, reaching unprecedented levels before Oct. 7, it occurs within relatively narrow, neo-Revisionist ideological boundaries. As Mairav Zonszein, a Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group, recently wrote, “[t]he thousands of Israelis who are once again turning out to march in the streets are not protesting the war. … They are not calling for a cease-fire or an end to the war — or for peace. … They are primarily protesting Netanyahu’s refusal to step down and what they see as his reluctance to seal a hostage deal.”
Israel’s peace camp will not reemerge from the ashes. A meaningful ideological alternative to the Netanyahu-led right can be formed, but it will take time. People’s minds need to be changed first, and coalitions must be built based on the shared interests of some of Israel’s disparate tribes — including Arabs, the liberal Zionist left and, most likely, large segments of the Haredi community. But right now, amid the horrors unfolding in Gaza, these goals are only aspirational.
To start paving the way toward those goals now, the international left should single out committed activists — Palestinians and Israelis who are working in some of the most difficult political terrain — and assist them. More than this, it must establish and promote independent, positive visions for Israel and Palestine, connect with local and international allies on its own terms, and exert pressure on the Israeli regime from without. In the long term, the most effective work that can be done by international organizations is to promote the coalitions that will make up Israel’s future peace camp, engaging with the progressive minority within the Haredi community, with Palestinian citizens of Israel and with the Israeli left.
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