This is the last chance for the Zionist Left.

If the Israeli Left fails to seize this moment, it will find itself in the dustbin of history.

The Knesset (Israel’s parliament) in session

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This is a guest essay written by Samuel J. Hyde (Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute) and Blake Flayton (a Zionist writer).

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

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Israel’s Labor Party head Merav Michaeli’s exit from politics several weeks ago was a much-predicted development since both the outbreak of war and the establishment of our current Israeli government.

In the last national election in 2022, Labor clinched four seats, the lowest turnout for the party in Israeli history. Some blamed the decision to not unite with Zehava Galon’s Meretz party. Others, on the diminished sense of security that Israelis felt after a turbulent couple of years with the Palestinians. A few, the muted voter participation in Tel Aviv, where young people, as is the case all over the world, are less reliable at the polls.

All these explanations come up short in analyzing exactly what happened, considering the Israeli Left has been on an (albeit nonlinear) downward spiral since the Camp David Summit in 2000¹. What both Labor’s losses in the last election and Michaeli’s congenial farewell speech each signify, rather, is the death of the new Zionist Left, and, we sincerely hope, a much-needed revival emblematic of the ethos of the old Zionist Left.

First, what is the “new Zionist Left?”

One only must look to Michaeli’s rebranding of the Labor Party in 2021 and within the anti-judicial reform protests² of 2023 to get an accurate sense.

Since the Second Intifada³, when as many Israelis know, the “land for peace” equation quite literally blew up in the faces of hundreds of innocents, “the Left” (institutions like Labor and Meretz) was crucified for what turned out to be fundamentally flawed political program. It became clear that negotiating with the Palestinians was a dead end — as in, will end in dead bodies.

The unfolding tragedy led the Left, after the Camp David Summit, to pivot to what we recognize it as today: a championing of social issues, like the role of women, Arab social mobility in Israeli society, LGBT rights, and fighting the intrusion of religion in the public square. This is the “new Zionist Left.”

There is no doubt that the new Zionist Left has championed righteous causes. The Right in Israel, which is increasingly linked to religious and racist forces, has pursued policies to undo the social fabric of the state for years, whether it be Haredi⁴ parties pressuring the transfer of funds away from the military (during war), the Arab Israeli sector, public schools, and cultural institutions, toward religious education, the division of men and women in secular spaces (including the IDF) or forces within the Israeli settlement movement.

These issues are important enough to galvanize the country into taking to the streets each Saturday for more than half a year; most protestors cognizant that the government’s plan for “judicial reform” was merely a scheme for the religious Right to override a necessary check on power.

Yet unfortunately, the polls, since long before the war started, have failed to match the energy in the street. Labor has been consistent with around 1.8 percent of the vote, not nearly enough to clinch representation in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). Meretz, not even in the current Knesset, is running at five-to-six seats — positive movement, of course, but not enough to resuscitate the Zionist Left from its era of blaring defeatism.

We propose that what happened on October 7th was not only a tragic and painful wound for the Israeli people. We suggest that it also set the stage for a political turning point; an opportunity to address Labor and Meretz’s abysmal polling numbers. October 7th, and the war we currently find ourselves in, is an opportunity to replace the new Zionist with the old Zionist Left.

The movement to return to the old Zionist Left is not to implement more socialism in Israel’s economy. Nor is it a call to jettison domestic disputes from our platform. In fact, there is no reason to be any less aggressive on social issues, considering 73 percent of Israelis — and even 70 percent of Likud⁵ voters — support public transport on Shabbat.

What’s more, 73 percent are in favor of allowing businesses to open on Shabbat; 68 percent support complete separation of religion and state; 70 percent support equal rights for the LGBT community; 76 percent of Israelis think same-sex marriage should be legalized; and 60 percent of Israelis believe same-sex couples should have adoption rights.

Despite the Right’s relentless campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, most of the public still supports this institution: Israelis’ level of trust in the judicial system is the highest measured since 2001, which only increased after the current Netanyahu-led government’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary.

In addition, our call to return to the “old” is also certainly not an encouragement to return to the era of Oslo Accords⁶ and Camp David — the idea of negotiating with the Palestinians with the “land for peace” program. Rather, we are suggesting that the Zionist Left cease to ignore the Palestinian issue and cease to ignore the arena of foreign policy.

On the contrary, the Left must aggressively fashion themselves the new vanguard for a secure State of Israel. The Left must present a political program that envisions a specific future for the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, and simultaneously take the mantle of expanding the Abraham Accords: reaching normalization agreements with Saudi Arabia and other states opposed to Iran’s increasing regional influence, recognizing this as the only viable path to achieving progress with the Palestinians.

On Iran itself, the Left must be bullish on confronting the Iranians militarily when practical, as in continuing strikes against nuclear sites and individual personnel responsible for the nuclear program and the sponsorship of regional terrorism.

This is what David Ben-Gurion⁷ did. “Security First” is the original framework of the Israeli Left. For too long the Right has used the Second Intifada and rockets from Gaza as a bludgeon against leftists, hypocritically refusing to take responsibility for the near-constant violence we have seen in the last 20 years, near constantly under Right-wing leadership.

A determined Right has been using aggressive tactics and has championed a divisive “us or them” rhetoric whereby the religious Right is proclaimed as representing Zionist Israel while everyone else is labeled a traitor: the Left, Arab Israelis, the Supreme Court, uncooperative media, and even the IDF and police. The new Zionist Left has needlessly conceded that this is true, failing to provide an alternative program that in reality matches the policy preferences of a majority of Israelis.

According to the 2017-2018 National Security Index, 55 percent of Israeli Jews support the two-state solution (as do 96 percent of Arab Israelis). This is not empty support for a slogan but true acknowledgement of what this would demand: 63 percent of Israelis support evacuation of settlements as part of a permanent agreement with the Palestinians, while only 27 percent are opposed. In other words, the public is still consistent in supporting this solution.

The solution toward partitioning the land must still be championed, but with radically different language and with different feasible goals. Instead of redrawing maps to indicate where a Palestinian state would lie, the Israeli Left must instead focus its efforts on drawing a final Eastern border — designating which settlements are “in” Israel, and which are officially out.

Also included in this program must be the refusal to remove soldiers from outside of Israel’s border. The Left must reiterate, if it is to make security its primary issue, that occupation of territory which can be weaponized to harm the State of Israel is legal and important, so long as it is temporary.

What will spell the end of the occupation, the removal of soldiers from territory, is a future agreement with the Palestinians — facilitated by the Arab world which in the past has indulged Palestinian rejectionism — that completely abandons the idea of millions of Palestinians and their descendants returning into the borders of sovereign Israel.

The Left’s rallying call of the past — the “negotiation fetish” championed by U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — must end abruptly. Before any long, drawn-out political process is undertaken, the Palestinians must sign a predetermined agreement that they are willing to concede on the claim of “right of return” and in doing so no longer seek to turn the Jews into a minority in their own nation-state through a demographic death-knell.

The Left must be on the forefront of pressuring international powers and bodies, including the United States, to ostracize, defund, and/or dismantle the institutions of prolonged Palestinian rejectionism, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, the Palestinian Authority’s policies that reward the families of terrorists, and political organizations that work to penalize Israel for settlement building with no desired concessions for the Palestinians.

Reverting the “new Zionist Left” (which in its obsession with social issues and avoidance of foreign policy and security policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians has plummeted in the polls) to the “old Zionist Left” (which re-prioritizes security and an eventual solution to the conflict) is the last opportunity for the Israeli Left to revive itself.

Only by presenting specific policy proposals, pertaining to the issues the Israeli public cares about the most, especially considering this particularly violent war, can the Left hope to see positive movement — and representation in not only the Knesset, but in the governing coalition.

If the Left fails to seize this moment, it will find itself in the dustbin of history. After our current war with Hamas and Hezbollah, there will be no legitimate political movement in Israel that does not centralize personal and national security. None will be able to rely on domestic disputes alone.

This was the realization that led to Merav Michaeli’s overdue departure from the Labor Party and Israeli politics. It was a realization that came to many on election night in 2022, and it dawned upon many Israelis during the early, horrific hours of October 7th.

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1. A summit meeting at Camp David between United States President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, in an effort to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

2. From January to October 2023, large-scale protests took place across Israel in response to the government’s push for a wide-ranging judicial reform. The proposed reform aimed to give the government full control of the Supreme Court or court decisions through various ways.

3. A major uprising by Palestinians, marked by rampant terrorism, against Israel starting in 2000

4. A member of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects

5. Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party

6. A pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s

7. The State of Israel’s first prime minister