What if Israel stops being the Jewish world’s great common project?

Israel’s election has settled very little. Likud won the most votes, but Netanyahu’s bloc fell to 53 seats, short of a majority; the Zionist opposition has 48, while the two Arab parties won a record 19. So Netanyahu didn’t exactly win. But neither did the Israel that opposes him. 

Yet beneath the election results lies something more consequential. We normally think of elections as moments when countries change their minds. But Israel isn’t just changing its mind. It is changing its electorate. 

Israeli society is becoming more religious. Not because it is finding God, but because religiously observant people are having more children than secular people. The Haredi population numbers about 1.5 million today – 14.3% of all Israelis – but is expected to break the 3 million barrier in the 2040s and reach around 22% by 2045. National-religious Jews also tend to have higher fertility than secular ones. 

That is impactful because religiosity correlates strongly with politics. In the 2022 election, 97% of Haredim and 80% of national-religious voters supported parties that formed the right-religious coalition. By contrast, 74% of secular voters backed opposition parties. 

Demography isn’t destiny. But Israelis also have powerful reasons for becoming more hawkish: the Second Intifada, Hamas, repeated rocket attacks and wars and, overwhelmingly, 7 October. Whatever liberal-minded Jews in London or New York would ideally like Israel to be, Israeli society is becoming more religiously and politically conservative. 

But what might Israel lose as that process evolves? For much of its history, Israel has been the great shared project of modern Jewish life. Jews of all stripes have had a stake in it. Israel has rarely been uncontroversial, but it has given Jews an extraordinary sense of collective meaning. 

The increasing danger is that it becomes more a source of Jewish division than unity. JPR’s recent work among British Jews already hints at this. British Jews have not abandoned Israel. Emotional attachment has actually increased since 7 October. Yet many have also become more troubled by what Israel does. Pride and shame can, and do, coexist. But at a certain point, they break apart. 

For many Diaspora Jews, democracy, minority rights, pluralism and universal human dignity are intertwined with their understanding of Judaism. So arguments about Israel are not simply about Israeli policy, but Jewish identity itself. As Israel becomes more religious, nationalist and hawkish while much of the Diaspora remains liberal and pluralistic, that tension is only likely to intensify. 

Some might say: so be it. Israel cannot determine its security policy according to what makes Jews in Hampstead or Manhattan comfortable. Perhaps liberal-minded Jews who cannot stomach the harsh realities of Jewish power will simply just drift away. 

But that would be a loss for both sides. A Jewish state that represents ever fewer ways of being Jewish becomes a smaller Jewish idea, even as its population grows. And Diaspora Jews lose too: nothing other than Israel has comparable power to provide a sense of Jewish collective agency, historical meaning and shared destiny. 

But there is a deeper reason why this matters. The argument itself is profoundly Jewish. Our intellectual tradition has long honoured disagreement rather than erase it. And Israel is wrestling with recognisably Jewish disagreements. How much do we owe our own people, and how much the stranger? When does self-defence become excessive? How Jewish should a Jewish state be? How should Jewish sovereignty accommodate non-Jews?  

There are no simple answers. But Israel needs Jews who answer these questions differently. And that places a particular responsibility on the religious and conservative majority likely to dominate its future politics. A minority understandably fights to preserve its way of life. But a majority becomes responsible for sustaining the whole. 

The challenge is not that religious Israelis have more children, or simply that Israel becomes more conservative. It is that demographic dominance persuades one part of the Jewish People that it no longer needs the others. 

Israel twenty years from now will almost certainly be more religious, and probably more conservative and hawkish too. But the great Zionist achievement was never simply creating a country in which Jews could defend themselves. It was creating a place in which the Jewish People, in all its maddening diversity, had the agency to shape its shared destiny. 

So the danger isn’t that one side wins Israel’s arguments. Democracies need decisions and majorities must govern. The danger is winning so completely that the argument itself disappears. 

Israel needs the argument. Diaspora Jews need it. Judaism needs it. Israel’s emerging majority will almost certainly have the numbers to shape the Jewish state in its own image. The real test is whether it has the confidence not to do that, but rather to preserve something more valuable: a Jewish state capacious enough to remain the common project of Jews worldwide, even as they profoundly disagree about what that state should be. 

• Dr Jonathan Boyd is the Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research