The November elections offer an opportunity to reconsider how governments should treat people who have lived for decades in communities where their legal right to remain is challenged.
Hundreds of thousands have built their lives in these communities. They work, pay taxes, own homes, establish businesses and raise families. They have become part of the social and economic fabric of the places they call home.
Many were born there. Their parents and grandparents established roots decades ago. They attend local schools, speak the language and know no other home. Why should children bear the consequences of decisions made before they were born?
Critics argue that their presence violates the law and that granting legal recognition would reward unlawful behavior. But laws can change, and governments must weigh legal obligations against the human consequences of uprooting established communities.
Mass removal would separate families from their homes, destroy businesses and empty neighborhoods. Decades of peaceful residence create human interests that cannot simply be dismissed.
These are familiar arguments in the American debate over immigration enforcement and the treatment of undocumented immigrants.
Those same humanitarian considerations arise in another debate involving more than half a million Jews living in Judea and Samaria.
An ancient doorway in Herodium in Judea, sealed with rocks until it can be secured (photo: First One Through)
Those advocating changes to ICE’s enforcement policies emphasize family unity and the human costs of removal. Those principles can also inform discussions about Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Imagine Tibetan Buddhist monks helping organize a private real estate fair in Paris for Tibetan families interested in buying homes in their ancestral homeland.
As a matter of politics, China governs Tibet and considers it an integral part of its territory and rejects Tibetan independence. As a matter of religion, history and heritage, Tibetans have maintained their connections to their homeland for centuries.
The real estate event is a test between these viewpoints.
The fair brings together developers, real estate agents, lawyers and families considering where to live, raise children and rebuild their communities. But against this personal desire, imagine French left-wing politicians and activists calling for the fair to be prohibited, accusing organizers of facilitating international crimes and questioning whether French citizens relocating there should continue receiving consular services.
There would undoubtedly be questions about why a private gathering of families and property professionals had become the subject of such political scrutiny.
Now replace the Tibetan families with Jewish families, and Tibet with Israel.
On November 15, the privately organized Icube Israeli real estate fair is scheduled to hold its 95th edition in Paris. Established in 1990, the fair brings together developers, brokers, lawyers, financial advisers and families interested in purchasing homes in Israel. It has enflamed anti-Israel agitators and politicians.
Aymeric Caron called for authorities to prohibit an October aliyah fair, alleging that it promoted immigration to what he described as illegal Israeli settlements.
Ersilia Soudais reportedly sought cancellation of similar events in Paris, Marseille and Lyon.
Andrée Taurinya accused French authorities of “complicit silence” for allowing aliyah fairs and raised allegations of complicity in war crimes. She also proposed restrictions on consular services for French citizens living in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
Sylvie Ferrer, in a November 3 parliamentary question, specifically raised concerns about the upcoming November 15 Icube event, citing its previous exhibitors and alleged connections to settlement-related projects.
The controversy has also reached the media. TRT Français has published critical coverage of Israeli real estate fairs in Paris, highlighting allegations about properties in disputed territories and reporting calls for demonstrations against the events.
All this is unfolding in France, where antisemitic incidents have increased sharply and many Jewish families are reconsidering their future.
If there would be no outcry of Tibetan monks holding a real estate fair to buy property in Tibet, there should be no cause célèbre for Jews buying property in the Jewish holy land.
Hamas called its October 7, 2023 war “Al-Aqsa Flood”. The name announced its ambition to ignite a religious war that would mobilize the Muslim world against Israel and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.
The attack began in southern Israel, far from Jerusalem. Hamas terrorists invaded Jewish communities, murdered families, raped and slaughtered young people at a music festival, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. Yet the operation was named for Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.
Al Aqsa Mosque (photo: First One Through)
Jerusalem was the rallying cry. The destruction of Israel was the objective.
Hamas’s 1988 founding charter called for Israel’s destruction via jihad, invoked religious teachings about killing Jews, and envisioned an Islamic Palestine encompassing the entire land.
On October 7, Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif called on Muslims throughout the region to join the battle. He summoned armed organizations in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and appealed to Arabs in Jerusalem, the Negev, the Galilee, and across Israel to rise up. Al-Aqsa, located on the site of the ancient Jewish Temples, provided the religious banner under which Hamas hoped to unite Muslims across national borders.
“Today, the people are bringing back the revolution and reviving the March of return.” [Arabs in Jerusalem and inside Israel, in the Negev, the Galilee and the Triangle area:] “set the earth on fire under the feet of the occupiers.” – Mohammed Deif on October 7, 2023
Hezbollah answered the following day, attacking Israel from Lebanon. The Houthis subsequently launched missiles and drones from Yemen and attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Iranian-backed militias joined the fighting from Iraq and Syria. Iran, which had spent decades arming and financing organizations dedicated to Israel’s destruction, eventually attacked Israel directly.
The war spread across the region, drawing in Iran’s network of armed allies. The broader Muslim uprising Hamas sought, however, never materialized. Egypt and Jordan maintained their peace treaties with Israel. Saudi Arabia stayed out of the fighting. Muslim-majority countries across Asia and Africa condemned Israel’s military campaign but kept their armies at home.
Most revealing was the response of Israeli Arabs, whom Deif had specifically called upon to rise against Israel, hoping they would further their war against the Jews they had started in May 2021.
Yet they overwhelmingly stayed out of the fighting. A December 2023 Israel Democracy Institute survey found that 56% agreed the October 7 attack did not reflect the values of Arab society, the Palestinian people, or Islam. Nearly two-thirds felt part of Israel and its problems, while 86.5% supported civilian volunteering during the war. [Note that the Israeli Arab response about feeling part of Israel varied by religion: Druze (80%), Christians (73%) and Muslims (62%)].
Israeli Muslims had access to Al-Aqsa. They could judge Hamas’s claims about the mosque against their own experience.
Israeli Muslim women descend from the Temple Mount (photo: First One Through)
While Hamas’s appeal for a mass Muslim uprising went largely unanswered, a very different movement was taking shape thousands of miles away.
On October 12, five days after the massacre, National Students for Justice in Palestine organized a “Day of Resistance” on American college campuses. Its organizing materials celebrated October 7 massacre as a historic victory for Palestinian resistance and called for the dismantling of Zionism.
“Long live October 7th” banner in New York City
The language spread through campuses, demonstrations, and activist networks. Some Western radicals celebrated the attack on Israeli civilians as resistance against colonialism. Hamas’s religious struggle acquired the vocabulary of progressive politics that had been promoted on campuses over the prior decade.
As the war continued, international attention increasingly centered on Israel’s military campaign, Palestinian civilian suffering, and smears of apartheid, colonialism, and genocide. Within activist narratives celebrating October 7, Hamas’s original declaration of a religious war and its eliminationist objectives disappeared behind the language of so-called “liberation.”
Hamas declared a jihad against the Jewish state but Israeli Arabs overwhelmingly declined the call. Yet Western radicals thousands of miles away celebrated the massacre as “liberation,” volunteering to become the political instruments of a jihad they mistook for social justice.
The American Dream promises that anyone can achieve anything. Build a business, accumulate wealth, enter politics and shape culture. Pursue your ambitions without an artificial ceiling imposed by your ancestry or religion.
Unless, according to antisemitic conspiracy theories, you are Jewish.
For centuries, Jews have been accused of controlling banks, manipulating politicians, owning the media and starting wars. The accusations change with the times, but the underlying claim remains: Jews possess too much power, and that power is dangerous.
Nazi Germany defined Jews by ancestry. Fighting for Germany, converting to Christianity, marrying a non-Jew or even supporting Hitler could not erase Jewish ancestry. As explored in What Does a Jew Have to Do to Be Accepted?, there was no reliable way to become acceptable under Nazi racial ideology.
The contemporary jihadi-socialist alliance presents a different challenge. Some of its rhetoric portrays Zionists and Jewish institutions as part of a privileged elite, accused of colonialism, oppression and Jewish supremacy. The objection is framed not simply around Jewish ancestry, but around Jewish power.
Left-wing media The Nation, described the grassroots organizing to oust unpopular incumbent Congressman Jamaal Bowman as a fight waged by Jewish billionaires against a poor Black man
That suggests a different solution. If Jews have too much power, perhaps they can become acceptable by surrendering some of it.
But how much?
A Jewish businessman can succeed, but at some undefined level of wealth, as success becomes evidence of financial domination. A Jewish politician can gain influence, but too much influence becomes proof of a conspiracy. Jewish writers, journalists and entertainers can flourish, until their achievements are portrayed as Jewish control over American culture.
How much Jewish wealth is acceptable? How many Jewish members of Congress? How many newspapers, universities or businesses may Jews lead before their achievements become threatening?
There is no published limit. No established threshold.
The conspiracy theory supplies its own answer: Jewish success is evidence of Jewish power, and Jewish power is something to fear.
This is a peculiar kind of glass ceiling. Jews are not necessarily prevented from achieving success. They are condemned for achieving too much of it. The ceiling becomes visible only after they have supposedly crossed it.
Perhaps Jews should stop contributing to political campaigns, lobbying Congress or advocating for their interests. Perhaps they should withdraw from finance, become less prominent in entertainment and apologize for their prosperity.
Would that make them acceptable?
What about their synagogues? Jewish institutions increasingly rely on security guards, police protection and barriers against attacks. Should Jews abandon those protections to demonstrate that they enjoy no special privileges? Must Jewish worshippers accept intimidation outside their synagogues to prove they deserve no more protection than anyone else?
And what about Israel?
Americans routinely celebrate their ancestral homelands which is a core part of Judaism. Yet Jewish support for Israel is sometimes portrayed as evidence of divided loyalty or Jewish supremacy. Must American Jews abandon their homeland and support for the Jewish state or distance themselves from Jewish organizations to demonstrate that they are acceptable Americans?
Is there an emerging demand that Jews can participate in American society, provided they never become too wealthy, too influential, too visible or too supportive of Israel? An invisible glass ceiling over Jewish achievement, with the height determined by those who resent it.
That is not the American Dream.
In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”
George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport
Washington rejected the idea that Jews lived in America by the generosity of a Christian majority. Their rights were inherent. They could worship, prosper, participate in government and pursue their ambitions without asking permission. There was no provision that Jews must remain sufficiently poor, powerless or inconspicuous to avoid offending others.
The demand that Jews surrender their supposed power would turn Washington’s promise upside down. Political participation becomes a privilege. Economic success becomes an offense. Supporting Israel becomes a test of American loyalty. The American Dream becomes something Jews may pursue only until their success makes someone uncomfortable.
That is unacceptable.
The American Dream has no Jewish ceiling. Those who would impose one are challenging something far greater than Jewish success.
Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938 – November 9, 2026
Imagine being a Jew living in Germany in 1910, with the extraordinary ability to see the future. You know that Adolf Hitler will come to power in 1933, that antisemitic laws will follow, and that on November 9, 1938, synagogues will burn across Germany and Austria.
You love Germany. Your family has lived there for generations. You want to remain in your homeland, raise your children and grow old among your neighbors. What should you do over the next 28 years to ensure that you and your family will be accepted?
Perhaps you should enter government service immediately.
Excellent idea. On April 7, 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, removing Jews from government employment. But Jews who had entered service before August 1, 1914, were exempted.
Perhaps you should fight for Germany in World War I.
Another excellent decision. Jewish veterans who had fought at the front were also exempted from the 1933 civil service purge. Even Jews whose fathers or sons had died fighting for Germany received protection under that law. Some 12,000 German Jews died fighting for their country during World War I. Surely that counted for something.
Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882), Die Jahrzeit (Minjan), 1871
Perhaps you should marry a Christian German woman, convert to Christianity and raise your children as Christians.
That might offer additional protection. Conversion would not change your racial classification under Nazi law, but an existing marriage to a non-Jewish German could affect how the authorities treated your family.
Monument in Berlin, Germany for the German women who fought to save their Jewish husbands from death in the Nazi concentration camps. (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Or perhaps you should go even further. What if you supported Hitler himself?
You could embrace German nationalism, reject Jewish communal organizations, vote for the Nazi Party and seek to join its ranks. You could agree with its economic program, its hostility to communism and its promise to restore German greatness.
Would becoming a Nazi make you an acceptable Jew?
No. The Nazi Party generally excluded Jews from membership, and its racial laws did not reward Jewish ancestry with exemption because someone supported Hitler. Political loyalty could not transform a Jew into an Aryan. You might have agreed with every Nazi policy except its treatment of Jews. That disagreement would not have saved you.
And the other strategies were unraveling.
In 1935, the Nazis eliminated the civil service protections for Jewish veterans and longtime government employees. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of full citizenship rights and prohibited marriages between Jews and people classified as German or related blood.
By 1938, German Jews faced escalating economic exclusion, confiscation of property, arrests and expulsions.
Consider Victor Klemperer, a German professor, World War I veteran, Protestant convert and husband of a non-Jewish German woman. He had embraced German culture and served his country. The Nazis nevertheless classified him as Jewish and dismissed him from his professorship in 1935.
On November 9, 1938, Nazi-organized mobs burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish businesses, attacked Jewish homes and arrested tens of thousands of Jewish men. The German Jew who had spent decades demonstrating his patriotism could watch his synagogue burn alongside the synagogue of the Jew who had never sought to assimilate.
Interior of synagogue torched during Kristallnacht
Eighty-eight years later, Jews across the diaspora face a renewed surge in antisemitism and questions about what makes them acceptable. In 2021, CAIR leader Zahra Billoo warned Muslims against the “polite Zionists,” including Jewish Federations, Hillel and synagogues. Even Jews who had stood alongside Muslims against discrimination were not necessarily friends. “Know your enemies,” she said.
So what should a Jew do today? Become an anti-Zionist? Denounce Israel? Turn against Jewish organizations? Would that finally be enough?
The German Jew of 1910 could spend the next 28 years changing everything about himself and still discover that he had changed nothing in the eyes of those who hated him.
There is no winning a contest in which someone else keeps changing the rules.
Jews should decide what they believe, whom they support and how they live their lives. The moment they begin making those decisions to satisfy people who demand that they become a different kind of Jew, they have already surrendered something far more important than approval.
If your synagogue is like mine, every morning after Shacharit since the October 7 massacre, the congregation has collectively recited two chapters of Tehillim (Psalms). We have prayed for the hostages, the wounded, the families consumed by the war, and the soldiers still fighting the terrorist regimes surrounding Israel.
This morning, just before the recitation began, a member of the minyan offered good wishes to another congregant who was making aliyah to Israel that evening. He and his wife would be joining their son, who serves in the Israel Defense Forces, and their new daughter-in-law. Hopefully, many more smachot, joyous occasions, await them in their new home.
It was a wonderful moment. But then we proceeded with the same two chapters of Tehillim.
I think we missed an opportunity.
We have become accustomed to reciting Psalms when something is wrong. We pray for healing, protection, salvation and the return of those in danger. But there are also moments when we should gather to celebrate what is right.
Throughout Shacharit, we recite numerous chapters and verses of Tehillim. They praise God’s greatness, celebrate His creation, recount His miracles, express gratitude for His kindness and affirm His justice. Some call upon all humanity to praise God. Others speak of Jerusalem, the Jewish people and the ultimate redemption.
Yet Psalm 128, all of six verses, offers something different. It celebrates the blessings of an ordinary, happy Jewish life.
The Psalm begins with a person who fears God and walks in His ways:
“When you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you.”
It continues with the blessings of marriage and family:
“Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the recesses of your house; your children like olive plants around your table.”
The Psalm then expands from the home to the Jewish homeland:
“May the Lord bless you from Zion, and may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life. And may you see your children’s children. Peace upon Israel.”
In six short verses, the Psalm moves from meaningful work to marriage, children, grandchildren, Jerusalem and peace upon Israel. There is no mention of wealth, fame or power. Happiness is found in building a good life, enjoying one’s family and seeing the next generation flourish in the Jewish homeland.
What better Psalm to recite for a family making aliyah, joining their children in Israel and beginning a new chapter of their lives?
And what better Psalm to recite every Shabbat?
For six days, we work to provide for our families and build our lives. On Shabbat, we stop working and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Families gather around the table. Parents enjoy their children. Grandparents celebrate another generation.
Psalm 128 describes precisely what we hope to experience on Shabbat, connecting the happiness of our homes to the prosperity of Jerusalem and the peace of Israel.
Synagogues should make Psalm 128 a regular part of Shabbat morning, just before Kiddush. Six verses to celebrate the blessings of family, meaningful work, Jewish continuity and our homeland.
We know how to come together to ask God for what we are missing. We should be just as practiced at celebrating what He has given us.
On November 6, 2026, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, condemned another alleged Israeli effort to “Judaize” the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron. The Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs declared the site an “exclusively Islamic endowment” and called for international intervention to protect its Islamic character.
The tomb is the burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. The Palestinian Authority is accusing Jews of Judaizing the burial place of their own patriarchs and matriarchs.
The declaration came on the eve of Shabbat Chayei Sarah, when Jews around the world read Genesis 23, describing Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite to bury Sarah. Abraham was subsequently buried there, followed by the other patriarchs and matriarchs. The site has been central to Jewish religious history for thousands of years, long before the emergence of Islam in the seventh century.
Muslims later culturally appropriated the site and instituted a regime of Islamic supremacy. Under centuries of Muslim rule, Jewish access to the tomb was restricted, eventually limiting Jews to praying outside the compound at the seventh step. In August 1929, Arab rioters massacred 67 Jews in Hebron, devastating the city’s ancient Jewish community. The killings and subsequent British evacuation nearly eliminated Jewish life in Hebron. Some survivors returned in 1931, only to be evacuated again in 1936. Jewish worship inside the Cave of Machpelah resumed following Israel’s capture of Hebron in 1967.
The contemporary campaign for exclusive Islamic control has been advanced by senior Palestinian officials. In August 2021, Mahmoud al-Habash, the Palestinian Authority’s Supreme Sharia Judge and religious adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas, declared “Israel and the Jews have no right – not historically and not religiously – to any centimeter of this purely Islamic mosque.“
In July 2026, al-Habash again declared that the site was a purely Islamic mosque and that non-Muslims had no rights there.
The Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf reinforced this position throughout 2026. It condemned Israeli construction work in the courtyard as an attempt to transform the compound into a synagogue, declared every courtyard and hall part of an exclusively Islamic endowment, and repeatedly characterized Jewish worship and religious administration as Judaization.
The Palestinian Authority’s campaign represents the continued Islamic appropriation of Jewish holy sites, denying Jewish religious rights while presenting Jewish prayer as an incursion. Through its religious ministry and official media, the PA promotes the Islamization of the Cave of Machpelah and the erasure of its Jewish identity, describing Jewish worship at the graves of Judaism’s founding families as an act of aggression.
The Palestinian Authority is so self-unaware that it has appealed to the “international and human rights institutions” to condemn Israel for violating Muslim rights at the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs. The world should use the opportunity to condemn this antisemitic denial of Jewish history and religious rights, rather than accept the outrageous claims of Palestinian officials.
This week’s Torah portion begins with Sarah being buried in a cave and ends with Rebecca entering Sarah’s tent.
The cave is permanent, a place for the dead. The tent is temporary, a place for the living. Together, they establish two foundations of Judaism: a homeland and a people.
After the death of Sarah, Abraham purchases the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron to bury her. Despite God’s promise of the Land of Israel, Abraham’s first recorded family property is a burial place. It anchors his family permanently to a particular piece of land, where generations will return to bury and remember their ancestors.
Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs
Rebecca makes the opposite journey. She leaves her birthplace, choosing to join Isaac and enter Sarah’s tent. According to the Midrash, the Shabbat light that burned from week to week, the blessing in the bread and the divine presence that had disappeared with Sarah’s death all return with Rebecca.
The cave preserves Sarah’s memory. The tent restores her way of life.
Jewish law teaches Lo’eg LaRash, that we refrain from displaying certain mitzvot before the dead because they can no longer perform them. We honor the dead by respecting what they have lost. We honor their lives by continuing what they began.
That is the paradox of the cave and the tent. The cave will remain in place for thousands of years, but no mitzvot can be performed by those buried within it. The tent can be dismantled tomorrow, yet the faith, traditions and values practiced inside can endure for generations.
We discussed the Five Israels this week: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel, the State of Israel, its government and its policies. Chayei Sarah establishes the first two, well before Jacob/Israel was born, and there was a Jewish kingdom or modern state. Judaism is rooted in a particular land, but its survival depends on a people who carry its practices and beliefs wherever they go.
Perhaps that is why a portion beginning with Sarah’s death is called Chayei Sarah, the Life of Sarah. In her passing she firmly established the Jewish family in the holy land forever, and her daughter-in-law continued her family and traditions for generations, wherever they would travel.
There is an expression in Hebrew “od avenu chai” that the Jewish patriarchs still live. It is lifted from the story of Joseph who asked his brothers whether their father Israel was still alive. We should consider that Sarah is the one whose life set the the course for the Jewish family.
Today, we refer to the “Land of Israel” and the “Children of Israel” because that was when the family became a nation. But at its core, the Jewish people have always been a family anchored in the land and traditions set out by the matriarch Sarah.
The self-described “pro-Israel” organization endorsed more than 200 congressional candidates in the 2026 midterms, raised over $13 million and projects a 98% victory rate. Its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, declared that J Street had become the center of Democratic politics on Israel.
The election results tell a larger story about how far that center has moved, and the role a progressive Jewish organization has played in legitimizing increasingly hostile positions toward Israel within the Democratic Party.
When Genocide Crossed the Line
In January 2024, J Street withdrew its endorsement of Congressman Jamaal Bowman following growing disagreements over his rhetoric, including accusations that Israel was committing genocide and his praise of controversial anti-Israel commentator Norman Finkelstein. Ben-Ami declared “When the rhetoric, the framing and the approach go too far, that’s where we are going to hold our line.”
No longer.
In November 2025, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution titled Recognizing the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, calling on the United States to officially recognize that Israel had committed “genocide.” Ten original cosponsors appeared among J Street’s successful 2026 endorsees:
Becca Balint — Vermont
André Carson — Indiana
Greg Casar — Texas
Hank Johnson — Georgia
Pramila Jayapal — Washington
Ro Khanna — California
Jim McGovern — Massachusetts
Mark Pocan — Wisconsin
Delia Ramirez — Illinois
Lateefah Simon — California
In less than three years, language that helped cost one politician J Street’s support had become acceptable among its endorsed candidates.
Beyond Genocide
The change extends beyond one accusation.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal called Israel a “racist state” in 2023. Congressman Ro Khanna and Congresswoman Delia Ramirez were among the politicians who formally sponsored the genocide resolution, while Khanna has also criticized Israeli rule in the West Bank as “apartheid.”
Their congressional votes reveal additional differences over America’s relationship with Israel.
On April 20, 2024, thirty-seven House Democrats voted to provide military assistance to Ukraine while opposing a separate assistance package for Israel. J Street-endorsed politicians André Carson, Greg Casar, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan and Delia Ramirez were among them.
On October 25, 2023, the House passed a resolution condemning Hamas’s October 7 massacre and affirming American support for Israel by a vote of 412–10. Carson and Ramirez voted against it, while Jayapal and Casar merely voted present. Curiously, J Street supported that resolution and subsequently endorsed politicians who declined to vote for it.
The widening range of accepted positions also includes economic boycotts. J Street officially opposes the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement but supports targeted import bans and sanctions involving Jews and Jewish businesses from Judea and Samaria. In September 2026, it welcomed such restrictions and urged similar American measures.
This has been a trend for years. Several endorsed politicians, including Carson, Jayapal and Pocan, voted against a 2019 congressional resolution opposing BDS.
J Street’s endorsements now accommodate accusations of genocide and apartheid, opposition to military assistance and a wider range of positions supporting economic pressure on Israel.
Moving the Political Center
J Street’s endorsements offer something an explicitly anti-Israel organization cannot: political cover from an organization identifying itself as progressive, Jewish and pro-Israel. That validation gives Democratic politicians room to advance positions once considered outside of liberal pro-Israel boundaries.
This unquestionably harms the State of Israel. It has also increasingly created a cleft inside the American Jewish community.
J Street may claim to be “the [new] center of the Democratic Party’s approach to Israel and Palestine,” but it has become a fringe extremist group among pro-Israel Americans.
Israel is routinely accused of maintaining a privileged Jewish class over Palestinian Arabs. Yet its latest election exposes a different system of institutionalized inequality: those who fight and die for the country shoulder burdens that other citizens are largely spared.
After three years of war on multiple fronts, Israelis awarded 19 Knesset seats to Israeli Arab parties and 13 to ultra-Orthodox parties. Together, more than one-quarter of Israel’s parliament now represents communities whose members overwhelmingly do not serve in the military, as Israeli Arabs are generally exempt from conscription, while ultra-Orthodox Jewish men have historically enjoyed widespread draft deferments and exemptions.
Israeli soldiers gather at Yad Va’Shem in Jerusalem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust (photo: First One Through)
Other Israelis must leave their families, careers and studies to defend the country. They risk injury, trauma and death. Meanwhile, fellow citizens enjoy the protection of that same military without comparable obligations.
Israel has created two classes of citizenship when it comes to national defense: those expected to sacrifice and those largely exempt from sacrifice.
Those who serve must defend a democracy in which others can exercise political power to preserve their exemption from serving.
An Israeli soldier, cellphone and gun in hand, rides the train to Tel Aviv (photo: First One Through)
The irony is that military exemption can also be a lifelong economic disadvantage. Military service is one of Israel’s great social and economic integrators, building professional networks, leadership skills, technological expertise and lifelong relationships. Research has documented significant employment benefits from service.
The same communities spared the risks of military service often miss its economic and social rewards. Israel’s unequal service system simultaneously concentrates military sacrifice and perpetuates economic separation. Israeli Arabs and Ultra Orthodox Jew are poorer than the secular country, in general.
Universal national service, whether military or meaningful civilian service, would do more than strengthen the military. It would bring communities together, expand economic opportunity and restore the principle that citizenship carries obligations as well as rights.
Israel’s divide is not between religions or races but between those who serve and those who don’t, the secular and the religious.
