The Left is doing Israel a favor by abandoning it.

What looks like distancing is actually forcing Israel to accelerate its independence, strengthen its defenses, and become more self-reliant in ways decades of alliance politics delayed.

photo: Ron Kampeas/JTA

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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There is a bitter appropriateness in the fact that, during the week of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day), Democrats are increasingly prepared to abandon Israel to its enemies to appease a faction of the party hostile to Jewish sovereignty.

The timing matters. Yom Ha’atzmaut comes on the heels of Yom Ha-Zikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day), when Israel stops in grief before rising again in independence. The Hebrew word atzmaut, drawn from the root ע-צ-ם, carries the double meaning of bone and self.

Sovereignty, in that sense, is not merely freedom from foreign rule. It is the recovery of a people’s own being — its history, its purpose, its civilizational core. And for Israel, as The Begin-Sadat Center’s Major General (res) Gershon HaCohen has argued, statehood was never meant to be an end in itself, but a means within a larger process of redemption.

Israel did not fall into disfavor because it chose the wrong prime minister. It has been attacked under Left, Center, Right, and national unity governments alike. That was true during the intifadas, true in the wars with Hezbollah, and true in repeated rounds with Hamas. It was true almost immediately after October 7th.

What we are seeing now from Democrats is not moral clarity; it is an old hostility to Jewish power in a new idiom. The shift has been underway for years, as Islamists and leftists — aided by anti-Zionist Jews who furnished both vocabulary and absolution — used academia, the media, the United Nations, and the nonprofit world to move hatred of a Jewish state from the fringes into the mainstream, and from the mainstream into the core of the Democratic Party.

So when Democrats call for distance, conditionality, or even the weakening of the strategic alliance, they insist they are doing so to help Israel embrace strategies to advance people through diplomacy. Israel does not face adversaries who see negotiation as the opposite of war. Islamists live by the doctrine of Al-Muqawama, or persistent warfare. Politics is war by other means; peace is not the objective. The objective is to deny the enemy victory by demoralizing and demonizing it.

Al-Muqawama is more than a military doctrine. It is an alternative order, built on the claim that corrupt Arab states cannot wage the historic battle, and that Islamic movements must do so instead — through arms, schools, charities, clinics, and commerce alike. Such an enemy does not read concession as generosity. It reads weakness as a delay, opportunity as a survival, and victory as a survival.

So what Democrats are really doing is telling the common enemies of America and Israel that the doctrine of Al-Muqawama is succeeding. As more of the Democratic Party coalition oppose arms sales to Israel and support for Iron Dome, and its candidates accuse Israel of genocide, it emboldens China, Russia, Iran and its proxies.

In the short term, Democrats are making it harder for Israel to defeat enemies committed to its destruction. They refuse to acknowledge that abandoning Israel militarily and diplomatically will not shorten the conflict. It will lengthen it and make it more deadly by feeding the enemy’s belief that pressure, patience, and outside intervention can achieve what force alone cannot.

At the same time, the Democratic Party’s abandonment is accelerating Israel’s rise as one of the most reliable and resilient nations of the 21st century. Thanks to Democratic Party capitulation, Israel is accelerating its efforts to achieve greater military and strategic independence, strengthen domestic weapon production and expand global partnerships around the defeat of Palestinianism and the Al-Muqawama doctrine.

Despite war and outside pressure, Israel is ascendant and stronger in many ways. Its economy grew 3.1 percent in 2025, up from 1.0 percent in 2024, with exports up 5.9 percent and investment up 7.1 percent, while forecasts pointed to stronger growth in 2026. Its defense sector remains powerful, with record exports of roughly $14.8 billion in 2024, missile-defense cooperation with Germany, and continued demand for Israeli systems into 2025 and 2026.

And while diplomatic normalization with Arab states has slowed, operational military integration is accelerating, shifting from a series of bilateral handshakes to a more unified regional network of radar and defense systems linked to Israeli software and know-how.

So, in the long term, Democratic Party disdain will likely accelerate the very outcome it seeks to restrain. The less Israel organizes its security and rules of engagement around U.S. approval, the more it will, as former Israeli politician Einat Wilf wrote, “buy what we want, and from whomever we want and most important, develop and produce what we want, even if it competes with American products.” It will “win … wars rather than be constantly subjected to arrested development ceasefires, meaning few casualties and shorter conflicts.”

Freed from the handcuffs being fashioned by anti-Israel forces, Israel will shape its own destiny. And the more firmly it shapes its own destiny, the more fully it fulfills the purpose of a Jewish state and the more it binds Jews everywhere with its future.

It is one of the important reasons Israel ranked eighth in the 2026 World Happiness Report and has by far the highest birth rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), at 2.9 children per woman.

While too few Jews are making aliyah (immigrating to Israel), non-Russian aliyah rose 23.6 percent in 2025, and North American aliyah reached a four-year high at 4,150. After October 7th, thousands of reservists and Israelis abroad dropped everything and flew home to serve, while airlines added flights to bring them back.

And across the diaspora, Jews sent enormous support to the war effort, including estimates of more than $1 billion in equipment for soldiers and far more in broader aid. These are not the marks of a country collapsing under pressure. They are the marks of a society turning ordeal into strength.

This leads to another benefit of the Democratic Party’s shift: Spending less time placating people and opposing policies pursued by anti-Zionist governments and groups, Israel will be able to free up resources to support those organizations and political systems that can benefit from closer ties. Former Israeli Ambassador ro the U.S. Michael Oren observed that Israel must cultivate its relations with India, other Asian nations, Africa, and South America.

And perhaps most important, Israel can invest in strengthening and shaping the relationship with Zionists around the world. That means financing and implementing a strategic plan for education, entertainment, culture, and youth programs centered on the virtues of Zionism — the movement, institutions, and ideas that sustain Jewish sovereignty.

Indeed, Jewish sovereignty is the foundation of Israeli democracy. And Israeli democracy (Jewish democracy) was established in the Torah, as Israeli scholar Ronen Shoval pointed out, to gather the Jewish People into a shared civic, legal, and national framework, restoring Jewish agency to history rather than dispersing it into permanent dependence.

As David Ben-Gurion wrote: “Israel is not like any other state ... The Jewish People has carried the yearning for redemption in its heart [for millennia], kept alive for centuries. … Without this destiny, it is devoid of its historical meaning and turns its back on the Jewish People today, in the generations that preceded us, and in the generations to come.”

Israel’s democracy is a “covenant of destiny” (brit ye’ud), a voluntarily chosen, purposeful commitment to building a shared future and fulfilling a moral or religious mission. The Far-Left — and increasingly many so-called mainstream Democrats — are disgusted by Jewish power used unapologetically in defense of Jewish national purpose. They are only comfortable with Jews as exiles and victims. A Jewish state fighting to shape its own destiny? That has become a political problem to eliminate.

So much the better. Israel will become more fully Jewish, more powerful, and more sovereign, with every attempt to weaken it, including the most recent orgy of Israel-bashing. The years ahead will be hard for Israel and for Jews. But just as Israel is democratic because it is Jewish, it is also resilient for the same reason. Its strength lies in the same Jewish inheritance that sustains its freedom: argument, memory, endurance, and the refusal to disappear.

May this 78th birthday for Israel be remembered as the day Jerusalem again proved a heavy stone to its foes — when those who sought to burden Israel only wounded themselves and helped the Jewish state forge a stronger future.

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