Too many Jews keep making this dangerous mistake about Israel.
Treating the Jewish state like a political project, instead of a homeland, is ripping the Jewish world apart.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A few days ago, an American family-friend shared an unpleasant encounter with their local rabbi: “During Trump’s first term, the rabbi started bringing politics into the congregation,” they said.
And my first thought was: What does partisan politics have to do with prayer, spirituality, or community? When did walking into a synagogue become an invitation to regurgitate the anxieties of cable news?
Not long after, someone else told me about a rabbi who gave a sermon on “Gaza,” as if the rabbi was a retired general or a regional strategist. Rabbis are teachers of Torah, stewards of Jewish tradition, caretakers of community — not geopolitical experts. When they start lecturing about military strategy, partisan ideology, or the politics of the moment, it doesn’t elevate the community; it fractures it. It replaces Torah with talking points, creates echo chambers, alienates those who disagree, and turns synagogues into battlegrounds. Spiritual spaces should be sanctuaries, not extensions of political Facebook.
These stories reflect a deeper and more troubling trend within Diaspora Jewish life: the growing assumption that supporting Israel is, or should be, conditional on whether one agrees with the current Israeli government. More and more, Jews outside Israel speak as though their political preferences from thousands of kilometers away should override the lived experience and democratic choices of 10 million Israelis.
For many Diaspora Jews, Israel is something they talk about; for Israelis, Israel is something they live every day. The gap between having opinions and carrying consequences has never been wider. In the Diaspora, critique is cost-free. People can casually condemn or “call out” Israel, knowing they will never have to run to a shelter, never send their children to the army, never sit at a Shabbat table with an empty chair because someone is in Gaza or Lebanon or Syria, never weigh a political decision against the question of whether their neighborhood will be safe next week.
In Israel, politics is not theoretical. Government decisions are not intellectual debates. They are daily life: life and death, safety and vulnerability, stability and chaos. Opinion without responsibility is easy. Opinion with responsibility is leadership. Israelis live the latter every single day.
A major driver of Diaspora frustration is that Israel has increasingly become a projection surface for other countries’ internal political identities. Some “progressives” critique Israel precisely because it symbolizes what they believe is wrong with the world; some conservatives defend Israel because it symbolizes what they believe is right with the world.
But Israel is not a political accessory for anyone’s American, Canadian, European, or South African identity. It is not a prop in a culture war; it is a homeland, a refuge, and the center of Jewish civilization. Zionism is not Left-wing or Right-wing; it existed before those categories and will survive long after today’s ideologies become outdated. It is a survival strategy, not a partisan position.
Many Diaspora Jews also believe they are entitled to unchecked opinions about Israel because they donate to Israeli institutions. Philanthropy is meaningful, but it does not confer governance rights. If I donate to the Louvre Museum, that doesn’t entitle me to dictate curatorial policy or rearrange the exhibits. Supporting Israeli organizations is an act of solidarity, generosity, and philanthropy, not a license to claim authority over Israeli politics or act as if you speak for the nation.
Then there are the Diaspora Jews who claim their opinions on Israel carry special weight because they once lived here. Living in Israel gives a person one vote in a democratic system; it does not make them the ultimate authority on Israeli life, nor the spokesperson for millions of Israelis.
Complicating matters further is the fact that many Diaspora Jews receive their understanding of Israel from media consumption. And here, honesty is crucial. The media — whether Left-wing, Right-wing, or independent — is the worst place to form your worldview about Israel. Not because journalists are inherently malicious, but because media companies are not in the business of providing you with holistic, contextual, historically grounded information. They are in the business of their business: engagement, attention, outrage, clicks, advertising revenue.
Their incentives push them to show you what provokes emotion, not what produces understanding. Forming your opinion about Israel through news media is like trying to understand a 3,000-year-old civilization by watching a highlight reel of its best and worst few minutes. It is not just incomplete; it is distorting.
Even beyond the media, many Diaspora Jews derive their views about Israel from a handful of Israelis they know: a cousin in Jerusalem, a college roommate from Tel Aviv, a niece who just finished her army service. These perspectives are real and important, but a few Israelis (no matter how beloved) does not represent 10 million people.
Israel is not a monolith. Its citizens span nearly every ethnic, ideological, religious, and socioeconomic identity possible. There are secular and ultra-Orthodox Israelis, Left-wing kibbutzniks and Right-wing settlers, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, and Russian-speaking communities, Arab Israelis, Druze Israelis, Bedouin Israelis, and dozens more. Anyone who claims to speak for all Israelis fundamentally misunderstands what Israel is.
Underneath all of this lies a historical reminder that too many Diaspora Jews forget: Jewish survival was not guaranteed. For two millennia, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers they could not vote for, armies they could not join, and borders they could not defend. Safety was conditional, fragile, and borrowed. Zionism did not arise because Jews wanted another political argument; it arose because Jews needed sovereignty — urgently, desperately, historically. Israel is not simply a country; it is the antidote to Jewish powerlessness. It is the insurance policy of a people who have repeatedly learned the cost of statelessness.
And this is where the current conversation goes off the rails. People think that because they dislike the Israeli government — or because their rabbi lectures on politics — they have grounds to suspend or withdraw their support for Israel altogether.
But Zionism is not a fandom that you cancel when the plot takes a turn you don’t like. It is not a coalition agreement. It is not a single or group of prime ministers. It is a 3,000-year-old commitment to Jewish continuity, Jewish safety, and Jewish self-determination. Tying your support for Israel to the political flavor of the moment is like refusing to visit your parents because you dislike the paint color they chose for their kitchen. It confuses the temporary with the eternal. It mistakes policy for peoplehood.
None of this means Diaspora Jews shouldn’t care about Israel or shouldn’t voice opinions. They should. Engagement is healthy. Critique is healthy. Love that includes honesty is healthier than love that includes silence. But Diaspora Jews ought to approach Israel with humility, with the understanding that the people who live inside the consequences deserve the loudest voice and the most respect.
If Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister and his coalition includes figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and ultra-Orthodox Jews, it is because a critical mass of Israeli citizens — people who live with the real-world consequences of their decisions — chose them. That choice may not align with one’s preferences abroad, but it deserves respect, not paternalistic second-guessing from thousands of kilometers away.
“But don’t you think Netanyahu has been in power for too long?” many people have asked me. Frankly, I don’t believe that is the right question to ask. In 2022, Netanyahu’s Likud party won the highest percentage of votes (23.4 percent), giving it the mandate to form a coalition for Israel’s 25th Knesset (parliament) and lead the country for the next five years. Whether I, you, or anyone else personally feels that Netanyahu has been in power too long is irrelevant. What matters is respecting the choice of Israeli voters and upholding the principles of democracy.
Israel’s challenges are real, its politics are messy, and its leaders are human. But Israel is not optional. It is family. It is peoplehood. It is a civilizational anchor.
It is true that Israel’s recent conflicts, including the Hamas-Israel war, have directly affected quite a few Diaspora Jews and their communities. Many Jews around the world are now experiencing heightened antisemitism, targeted harassment, and public hostility. This is serious, immediate, and deeply troubling.
But it is important to be clear: These terrible trends are not an indictment of Israel, because the rise in antisemitism is not a reflection of Israeli policy, coalition politics, or any individual politician’s actions. Rather, it is the work of antisemites seizing a socially fashionable pretext to act on age-old hatred — using current events as a cover to express prejudice that has existed for centuries.
Israel and Zionism have become convenient targets, not because they are morally or politically imperfect, but because antisemitism thrives wherever Jews exist. Recognizing this distinction is essential for Diaspora Jews: Feeling the impact of these conflicts does not mean Israel is at fault, and it does not give outsiders license to condition support for the Jewish state on personal political opinion.
If we want a healthier global Jewish conversation, we must start by disentangling our local political identities from our collective Jewish and Zionist destinies. One’s views in America or Australia or Europe or Canada on public safety, economic policy, social services, national defense, education, or even hot-button issues like climate change and artificial intelligence have nothing to do with the core of Jewish identity or the ancient, indigenous connection between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel. Those are contemporary political debates; Jewish peoplehood and the relationship to Israel are civilizational truths that predate today’s ideological categories by thousands of years.
And, so, we ought to stop outsourcing our understanding of Israel to media companies whose business models depend on political manipulation, narrative construction, outrage, and financial profit. We should listen to Israelis across the spectrum, not just the ones we’re in touch with (whose views might happen to align with our own). And we must expect rabbis to return to their ancient and noble task: teaching Torah, guiding souls, nurturing community — not recycling cable news.
Above all, we must remember that Israel does not belong to one political party, one ideology, or one generation. It belongs to the entire Jewish People. And if we are going to survive as one people, we must treat it that way. The difference between family and politics has to be restored. Israel is eternal. Politics is transient.
And if Diaspora Jews can return to that clarity, the conversation won’t just become more honest; it will become more united, and far more worthy of the story we inherited.
Rabbi always meant teacher. And Torah means literally “ instruction”. A Rabbi is a teacher of Torah and Jewish wisdom. And, O my, there’s so much to talk about.
The Tanakh is saturated with the Land of Israel and how the Land was always one with Ancient Israel’s identity. This is what Jews need to learn. There’s also the State of Israel, of course ,and the modern miracles that have occurred there, and the way our fellow Jews live there. One can draw on the internecine arguments in the Tanakh and project them to our own age and ages in between. Little has changed 😊.
All this takes a lot more knowledge, study, talent and Jewishness than opining in a pugilistic vein on politics, to vent one’s narcissistic momentary opinions, forgetting that Israel, again miraculously, is a democracy, and whatever government was chosen under its own sovereign system might change soon enough into a different one, one you might “ like” more or… less. How does that flux of choices by the Israeli citizens, our people, stack against our overall millenarian history? How can Rabbis be that petty and self-involved?
Rabbis used to be at least as large as Life, and many were and are larger than Life . Today, seminaries churn out too many mindless, immature characters , like those “ hello Rabbi!” in the Mamdani video advertisement. These incompetent non-leaders of Judaism are disservice to shepherding a congregation hungry for meaning and identity at best and a disgrace at worst.
There’s an aura of grandeur in the word Rabbi. The root of the word serves as the basis for “ great, vast, numerous”. The “ not-so-great, narrow and small minded” type embarrasses the meaning.
Very good article. Not being picky but we go back 3800 years on the land of Israel from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 3000 years ago goes back to the time of King David.