The bill to dissolve Israel’s Knesset passed its first reading earlier this month with 106 lawmakers in favor and none against, setting in motion a process that could move national elections up from Oct. 27 to as early as Sept. 8. (Discussions are ongoing about the specific date.)

The vote — unanimous across coalition and opposition parties alike — came against a backdrop of collapsing coalition discipline, a Haredi draft dispute, ongoing efforts by the government to advance a controversial judicial overhaul, the wars with Hezbollah and Iran and the potential renewal of large-scale fighting in Gaza.

As Israel’s opposition parties are gearing up for what promises to be a heated election season, the conversations happening among liberal Israeli civil society leaders and their funders uncharacteristically border on optimistic. This is, in part, inspired by the surprising upset of the more moderate Peter Magyar’s landslide victory that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power in Hungary. 

“We are seeing growing interest among the liberal camp in Israel in how the Hungarians managed to replace the government with people committed to the rule of law and democratic values,” according to Dan Sobovitz, a Hungarian-Swiss-Israeli citizen and co-founder of DemoCrisis, a transatlantic network connecting civil society organizations across countries experiencing democratic backsliding. 

“Perhaps the most important message is that until a few years ago, democratic backsliding seemed like a one-way process — the Hungarians and Poles have shown Israelis that this is not the case. We are at a junction where Israelis can stop the process of deterioration and return to the family of democratic nations,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy. For this group, Budapest is a data point — and the Knesset’s dissolution vote is the starting point.

Seemingly on the ballot is something that extends far beyond Israel’s borders: the high-stakes relationship between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, particularly American Jewry. 

Surveys in recent years have shown that while American Jews continue to feel connected to Israel, their ties to the country have become increasingly strained. This could be seen most recently in a Jewish Federations of North America survey that found that a minority of American Jews — 37% — identify as Zionists, even as nearly twice that number — 71% — said that they felt an emotional connection to Israel. This distancing has been credited to multiple factors, chiefly opposing political shifts in the two communities, with Israelis generally becoming more conservative and American Jews more progressive. This has been exacerbated in recent years by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, a perception that Israel is not interested in making peace with the Palestinians and its neighbors, and particular issues of religion and state in Israel that have alienated the mostly Conservative and Reform American Jewish community.

The community of funders, organizers and civil society leaders invested in Israeli democratic infrastructure is asking grave questions: What happens to that relationship if the elections don’t go their way? How will the continuation of the current government impact the safety and well-being of Jews around the world?

Sally Gottesman, a longtime funder of the New Israel Fund who is involved in democratic causes on both sides of the Atlantic, sees the rise in antisemitism as a direct result of Israel’s politics and a threat to American Jews. “Antisemitism has risen post-Gaza,” she said. “Israel’s the biggest problem Jews have. My Jewish safety is really dependent on Israel.” For Gottesman, the survival of Jews everywhere depends on Israel stemming its slide toward authoritarianism. “Democracy is good for the Jews — when we’re a minority and when we’re a majority. How are we not working to protect it in both places?”

Jeffrey R. Solomon, senior advisor to Chasbro Investments, the family office of Charles Bronfman, and co-founder of Birthright Israel, agrees that a change of government in Israel is vital not just to American Jews’ safety today, but also to the future of the Israel-Diaspora relationship, a critical underpinning for Israel’s security. “If this government gets voted out, there’s a chance to get the younger generation back,” he told eJP. 

“I refuse to believe that if the government doesn’t change, it would be the death knell to the relationship,” Solomon said. “But I think it could be 10, 15 years before we see any return.”

Mickey Gitzin, acting CEO at the New Israel Fund, sees the electoral situation from both sides of the Atlantic. “It’s true that Israelis support the war, but at the same time they’re not happy with their current moment,” he said. “No one feels safe and secure.” For Israelis, it is the combination of war exhaustion, economic strain and collective trauma from Oct. 7. On the other side of the Atlantic, it looks somewhat different. “If you ask me, ‘What are the priorities of our donors?’” Gitzin said, “It’s settler violence and the elections. Those are the things they feel the most engaged, bugged, worried and concerned about.” 

For the first time, a majority of Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Pew polling shows deepening American disaffection with Israeli policies and the current government. Don Futterman, a veteran civil society leader and Israel director of the Moriah Fund, traces the damage directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

“He has been the face of Israel for an entire generation,” Futterman told eJP. “And he’s been very explicit about spitting in the face of liberal Jewry.” 

According to Futterman, Netanyahu made Israel a Republican issue beginning in 2015 when the prime minister denounced Democratic President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy effort, the Iran nuclear deal, in an address to Congress at the invitation of Republican leadership and without the approval of the White House. 

This decision of favoring evangelical Christians over American Jews and developing a transactional relationship with the American right was not, in Futterman’s view, just a diplomatic miscalculation, it was an act of genuine harm to American Jews. “I believe that liberal values are what have both protected and enabled American Jews to thrive in American society. To undermine those values is self-destructive,” he said, adding that American Jews are already paying the price and could be paying for it for a generation.

Futterman said he believes that a change of government could begin to reverse the damage — but only if American Jewish leadership is willing to make the case clearly and publicly. “Once Netanyahu is not the face of Israel, I think things can change,” he said. “But American Jewish philanthropy has to be courageous enough to say to an Israeli government and to an Israeli prime minister: You are putting us in danger. You are endangering American Jewry. Our constituents are paying the price. And to write everything [critical of Israel] off as antisemitism is both simplistic and dishonest.”

Not everyone agrees that a change of government will heal the rift between Israel and the Diaspora. Ariel Moav-Morvari, leading activist at HaReshet HaMasortit and head of public policy at the Judaism and State Policy Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute, argues that the crisis between Israel and the Diaspora runs deeper than any election outcome.

“I think the gap is more significant than people say,” he told eJP. “There’s a bigger crisis here that doesn’t depend on the government. There are significant ideological and value gaps between the majority of the Jewish public in Israel and the majority of the Jewish public in the American Diaspora.” 

Changing the government, in his view, addresses the symptom rather than the underlying condition. “People imagine that if the current coalition loses power, all of its voters will suddenly disappear from Israel. They won’t. Governments change. Different periods come and go. That’s part of the normal dynamic of a democratic state,” he said.

The gap between what the democracy camp hopes for and what the elections can realistically deliver, he argues, is wider than people acknowledge. “We’re still dealing with the aftermath of Oct. 7. Half of Israeli Jews are religious and conservative. That’s not going to change,” Moav said.

In a sharp departure from what others in Israel’s liberal camp believe, Moav sees Netanyahu himself as a symptom rather than a cause. “He currently acts as a kind of gravitational center for the right. When he’s gone, right-wing populism could become even more fragmented and chaotic. The deeper issue is Israeli society itself and the divisions within it. The voters who support Netanyahu’s approach will still exist. They don’t vanish. That’s why I think focusing entirely on Netanyahu while ignoring his voters is a huge mistake,” he said. 

His diagnosis of the liberal camp’s strategic failures is pointed. “The liberal camp needs to learn how to cooperate more effectively, including with people it considers to be on the right side of the political map,” he said. Israel’s tribalism, he expects, will continue in the near term. “I hope we’ll eventually break out of this binary framework. I think that’s the most important thing that could happen. But as long as we’re stuck in this two-camp mentality, I don’t see a solution. It doesn’t work. I’ve thought about this for about 10 years,” Moav said.

That structural argument has direct implications for how the American Jewish philanthropic world engages with Israel. “American Jews naturally identify with the more liberal side of Israeli society,” Moav said. “That’s understandable and comes from good intentions. But they also need to learn how to build relationships and partnerships with more conservative and right-wing parts of Israeli society. If there is to be a conversation among Jews, it needs to include Jews from all parts of the political spectrum.”

Moav’s argument about engaging across the full spectrum of Israeli society runs directly into its hardest test: the question of Arab political partnership. According to most of the recent polls, the democratic opposition cannot form a government without Arab parties — and yet, after Oct. 7, Moav said, he simply doesn’t see that coalition forming. The political and emotional conditions are not there.

The two-state solution, which most American Jews see as the obvious endpoint of any democratic Israeli government, has become almost unspeakable in Israeli political discourse. Moav described attending a policy forum with center-left Israelis and Americans together, and being struck by the gap: Americans could speak easily and naturally about a two-state solution. For the Israelis in the room, the term bore no relationship to their lived reality after Oct. 7. “This wasn’t a group of Netanyahu supporters,” he noted. “It was mostly people opposed to the current government.” 

For the American Jewish community, Moav’s challenge is the hardest one this election cycle will pose. A change of government in the fall would matter. It would not, on its own, resolve the structural divergence between Israeli and Diaspora Jewish society that has been building for decades.

“If we’re looking at Hungary and saying, ‘They ran anti-corruption campaigns, so let’s do anti-corruption campaigns too’ — I think that’s simplistic,” Moav said. “The more useful lesson is that political situations are dynamic. People can change how they vote. Instead of copying someone else’s campaign, we should ask what would actually persuade people here.” 

What’s missing, in his view, is a willingness to engage beyond the liberal camp’s comfort zone. “If we’re talking about democracy, it has to be practiced in the demos — the people — not only in the circus or the system,” he said. The discourse, he argues, needs to change register. “Maybe it should be less moralistic and more focused on security concerns, because that’s what Israelis are thinking about right now.”

For Gitzin, the upcoming elections are not just about Israel — they are about preserving the identity of his entire constituency: liberal-minded Israelis and American Jews alike. 

For American Jews in the Diaspora, these elections have become deeply personal. “It’s not only about us,” Gitzin said. “It’s about them. They feel uncomfortable with their own personal identity in this context. It’s not like they give to us only because we give them the solution for the problems on the ground. It gives them the need here for their Jewish identity.”

For Solomon, who has spent his career building that identity — brick by brick, Birthright trip by Birthright trip — the stakes could not be higher. “If you think about the 2,000 years of wishing that it was relevant — and then, within our lifetimes, the wish being fulfilled — how are we so stupid as to blow it? Of all of the tragedies around Bibi’s endless reign, to me, that is the greatest tragedy.”