A 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect at 12 a.m. local time, halting more than a month of fighting. With the armistice in Gaza largely holding since October and the truce with Iran still in place as Tehran and Washington negotiate, Israel — and the rest of the Jewish world — enters a period of precarious calm. This effectively marks a return to how things were before Feb. 28, when the first U.S. and Israeli bombers targeted Tehran, albeit with Israel in a different geopolitical situation and with even more people across the region killed, injured, displaced and vulnerable. 

This resumption of routine, temporary or permanent, brings with it both opportunities and challenges. For the past two-plus years, since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the Jewish world has been jumping from crisis to crisis — wars, antisemitic attacks, natural disasters — with scant time for long-term planning and introspection.

Not everyone is thrilled about the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, particularly not the heads of Israel’s northern communities, which have been most affected by the fighting and have largely supported it with the belief that the conflict will ensure them greater security in the long term. The current truce, which was imposed on both parties by the U.S., comes as Hezbollah still maintains its arsenal of rockets, missiles and drones and its ranks of soldiers, who have long been training to raid northern Israeli cities and towns. 

“On Sunday, the [northern Israeli] city of Kiryat Shmona and residents of the city will launch a protest march against the truce, which abandons our security!” Avichai Stern, the city’s mayor, wrote on Facebook today. 

While it’s not clear how long this armistice will last, Jewish organizations and leaders can take advantage of the respite to devote greater resources to constructive, non-crisis considerations. 

In the short term, this includes planning for the summer, with camps and travel programs due to start in roughly two months. On a larger scale, the past week demonstrated the political shifts underway in the United States as it relates to Israel, with 40 Senate Democrats voting to block arms sales to Israel, including several lawmakers who previously rejected such efforts. For Jewish organizations that oppose such restrictions — and the message that it would send about U.S.-Israeli ties — major, multipronged efforts would need to be undertaken to at least begin to make military support for Israel a bipartisan issue. 

Responding to the vote, the Israel Policy Forum’s Michael Koplow warns against adopting a scorched-earth policy and recommends instead that pro-Israel advocates adopt a more nuanced approach to security assistance and arms sales, differentiating between reasonable Democratic concerns and true threats to Israel’s national security. “The pro-Israel community will need to recalibrate how it adapts to the new political reality, whether we like it or not,” Koplow wrote in his weekly column. “Taking an absolutist line is just not politically viable going forward for anyone who wants to preserve the space for pro-Israel Democrats to exist, which is going to be even more critical as more Republicans fall further down the isolationist and anti-Israel holes.”

But in addition to providing the Jewish world an opportunity for productive planning, this period of respite also allows for long-simmering, destructive disputes to again boil over. 

It is worth remembering that the days before the start of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran saw the passage of a bill in the Knesset that would make it a criminal offense to hold mixed-gender and women-led prayer services at the Western Wall, including at the current egalitarian plaza. Responding to the bill in these pages on Feb. 26, a self-described “lifelong Zionist” and longtime communal layleader called on American Jewish institutions to give “not one more dollar” to Israeli causes unless the country agrees to halt its infringement on non-Orthodox Judaism. Ultimately, over the course of the war, North American Jews allocated tens of millions of dollars to Israeli causes, even without these pluralistic assurances. 

Indeed, additional opinion pieces decrying the Israeli government’s support for the bill were written and submitted to eJewishPhilanthropy in the days following its passage but were retracted with the start of the conflict. War, it seems, has a habit of pushing such internal disputes aside. 

However, with the conflicts over — or at least on hiatus — these disagreements, along with fresh ones, such as the growing condemnations in Israel and around the world against Israeli extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, are liable to come roaring back. 

Within Israel as well, long-standing disputes about the role of the judiciary are already gaining steam and are likely to continue over the coming months ahead of the next national elections.