The Biggest Cultural Divide Between Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews

Israeli Jews ask for forgiveness. Diaspora Jews ask for permission. In our post-October 7th world increasingly hostile to Jewish identity, both are necessary.

The Israeli flag (photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash)

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There is a joke about a first-time tourist in Israel who’s in his rental car, looking for a parking spot, which is notoriously hard to find in the Holy Land.

This tourist observes a bunch of cars parked on the sidewalk. So, when he sees two police officers, he asks them, “Is it legal to park on the sidewalk?”

“No,” the officers tell him, “you cannot park on the sidewalk.”

“But all these other drivers did,” the tourist responds, to which the officers say, “That’s because they didn’t ask.”

This joke isn’t just funny; it’s true. If you had to boil down the deepest cultural difference between Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews into a single line, it would be this: Israeli Jews ask for forgiveness. Diaspora Jews ask for permission.

This split reflects a profound difference in posture, psychology, and historical experience — one shaped by sovereignty on the one hand, and minority status on the other.

To be Israeli is to be born into a culture of autonomy. The entire state was built on defiance — of the British, of the Arabs, of the desert, of historical inevitability. Israel exists because its founders stopped asking permission. They didn’t wait for the United Nations, the Vatican, or the British Mandate to hand them a neatly bordered country with a national anthem. They built it with sweat, sacrifice, and a whole lot of chutzpah.

By contrast, life in the Diaspora (particularly in the West) is built around negotiated belonging. This might be controversial to say, but Jews there are guests, however permanent. We learn from a young age how to navigate systems, how to excel without offending, how to succeed without seeming too successful.

In America, Britain, South Africa, France, Canada, Australia, South America, and elsewhere, Jews learned the art of thriving within someone else’s framework. To do so, they became masters at asking for permission: from universities, from employers, from governments, from neighbors.

This is not cowardice. It’s survival. Diaspora life has always required calibration: a constant tuning of identity to social context. That’s why Diaspora Jews tend to be cautious in speech, consensus-seeking in politics, and painfully aware of how they’re perceived. Israelis, by contrast, are famously blunt. In Israel, the national sport isn’t soccer or basketball. It’s arguing.

For Diaspora Jews, safety has historically been fragile — one pogrom, one populist leader, one conspiracy theory away from disaster. That anxiety lives in the bloodstream of Diaspora communities, passed down in cautious parenting, in code-switching, in the unspoken rule: “Don’t rock the boat.”

Israelis? They built the boat, armed it, and are not afraid to ram it into a blockade if necessary. (Let’s not forget when Israel “accidentally” attacked a U.S. Navy ship — the USS Liberty, a U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering ship sailing in international waters off the coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War.)

The result is a vastly different cultural psychology. Israelis are raised to be self-reliant, assertive, improvisational. Military service teaches them that confidence and boldness are survival instincts. You don’t ask for permission in life-and-death situations. You act, and if you need to say sorry later, so be it. This mentality bleeds into business, politics, and other parts of Israeli society.

This national ethos — forged in scarcity, honed in conflict, and driven by urgency — is what has made Israel one of the most innovative countries in the world. The culture of self-reliance, assertiveness, and improvisation that drives Israeli military success also powers its startup economy. Israelis don’t wait for perfect conditions. They build under pressure, invent out of necessity, and pivot without hesitation.

It’s no accident that such a tiny country leads the world in per-capita startups, cybersecurity breakthroughs, and medical technologies. In Israel, doing (not waiting) is the default. That mindset, born from survival, has become the engine of innovation.

Diaspora Jews, especially in liberal democracies, are more likely to defer, to consult, to weigh the optics. They’re attuned to what’s socially acceptable. Israelis are attuned to what’s operationally effective.

There’s also a moral difference. Diaspora Jewish life was, for millennia, powerless. That shaped a Judaism built on restraint, ethics, and moral persuasion. When you lack an army, a state, and a police force, you lean on God, law, and argument. You elevate principles like justice, peace, and universalism — because you have to.

Israel, meanwhile, is a state with the world’s strongest military, pound for pound. Power changes the conversation. Israelis know the dilemmas of borders, war, and triage. They live in a neighborhood where asking for permission from the international community — or even from one’s enemies — is a luxury they cannot afford. For Israelis, the morality of survival is real and raw: Will this operation prevent the next bus bombing? Will this checkpoint save more Israeli lives? If the world disapproves, they’ll deal with it later.

This isn’t to say that Israelis are immoral or Diaspora Jews are naïve. It’s that they live in different moral universes: one shaped by power and responsibility, the other by powerlessness and negotiation.

The friction between the two mentalities often erupts in Jewish communal life. Diaspora Jews cringe at what they see as Israeli rudeness, arrogance, or bulldozing. Israelis roll their eyes at what they see as Diaspora spinelessness, insecurity, and political correctness.

But in truth, each is a mirror to the other’s trauma. Diaspora Jews ask for permission because, for 2,000 years, the cost of not asking was death, exile, or ghettoization. Israelis ask for forgiveness because they’ve internalized that hesitation invites annihilation, and that the world rarely forgives Jews anyway.

This split even shaped how Jews viewed Zionism itself. Before 1948, many Diaspora Jews were not hardcore Zionists. They feared that overt support for a Jewish state would raise suspicions of dual loyalty. They wanted to be accepted as fully American, British, French, or Canadian, and worried that Zionism would undermine that.

It wasn’t until Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War that something shifted. For the first time, millions of Diaspora Jews felt not just supportive of Israel, but proud. Zionism, once seen as a risky political position, became a badge of Jewish dignity. Israel had not only survived; it had triumphed. And in doing so, it gave Diaspora Jews a rare feeling in Jewish history: collective pride without apology.

That moment also marked a major shift in global politics. Before 1967, the United States (a flag bearer of the West) had not fully embraced Israel as a strategic ally. France had been Israel’s main arms supplier. But after the Six-Day War — when Israel displayed military dominance, strategic savvy, and Cold War utility — Washington’s posture changed. The U.S. began to view Israel not just as a refuge for Holocaust survivors, but as a valuable partner in the Middle East.

And it’s worth asking: What if Israel had waited? What if it had asked for permission — from the United Nations, from Washington, from global opinion — before acting? It’s very possible that the war would have ended differently. With Arab armies massed on multiple borders, a first strike wasn’t just a tactic; it was survival.

Had Israel paused for international approval, it might have lost the war, the state, and the future of the Jewish People in the region. The lesson Israelis took from that week in June was seared into their national psyche: Don’t wait to be told you can defend yourself. Do what you must, and if the world has a problem with it, apologize later.

And in a strange way, that assertiveness — that unapologetic survival instinct — helped Diaspora Jews stand taller too. As Western Jews grew more confident in publicly supporting Israel — lobbying, fundraising, advocating — they helped normalize and institutionalize the U.S.-led West’s relationships with Israel. The emotional high of 1967 wasn’t just personal; it became political. Jewish identity, for many, now included a passport to global Jewish peoplehood.

So, in many ways, the relationship between Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews is very much coalesced. And, as such, the future of the Jewish People depends on bridging this cultural chasm. Diaspora Jews need to rediscover their birthright of confidence: the ability to speak, act, and defend themselves without waiting for approval. Israelis, meanwhile, must remember that strength is not just force, but also nation branding and empathy.

One side mastered survival by trying to fit in and keep relatively quiet, the other by unyielding grit.

Both are Jewish. Both are necessary. And in our post-October 7th world increasingly hostile to Jewish identity — whether in the cafés of Paris, the quad of North American universities, or the battlefields of Gaza — the time has come to combine these two spirits.

Because asking for forgiveness and asking for permission aren’t just cultural quirks. They are survival strategies. The real power lies in knowing when to use each.

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