Israel Independence Day 2026: The Renewed and Essential Role of Diaspora Jewry in the Israeli Story

On Israel’s Independence Day, 2024, we wrote that: “After years of a growing gap, October 7th changed the approach of many critical Jews towards Israel, fostering a more natural connection to the State of Israel. This "Peoplehood 2.0" shift holds significant potential for enhancing Israel’s resilience, economy, international legitimacy, and political landscape.” Now, two years later, we seek to offer Diaspora Jewry an even deeper place in the Israeli story, not only as a supporting factor, but as a partner that grants meaning to the Israeli story itself.

The vision we described two years ago is still far from full realization. After October 7, Diaspora Jews experienced a renewed awakening of Jewish identity, on both the personal and communal levels, which was expressed, among other things, in broad support for Israel. However, the prolongation of the war in Gaza, alongside the campaign of false accusations against Israel of “genocide,” led to the fact that support for Israel, and even the very choice to live openly as a Jew, became a challenge, and at times even an act requiring courage. Our enemies are trying to turn support for Israel into a burden, into a political and image-related liability for Jewish communities, and they promise, as though the Jews have learned nothing from history, that if the Jews would only abandon Israel, the hatred toward them would disappear. So far they have not succeeded in breaking the resilience of Jewish communities, but the effort continues, and is even expected to intensify in the coming years.

At the same time, in Israel, there is no doubt that Israeli society benefited from the philanthropic, political, and moral support of Diaspora Jewry after October 7, support that, as we wrote already then, strengthened Israel’s economy and its international standing. But even this support did not provide an answer to a deeper question: what is the place of Diaspora Jewry within the Israeli story?

For many years, the Israeli attitude toward Diaspora Jewry ranged between indifference and negation. One of the central expressions of this was the idea of the “Negation of the Exile”, an early Zionist conception according to which Jewish life outside Israel is a deficient, temporary, or inferior form of existence, and the full future of the Jewish people can only be realized in the State of Israel. Even if this conception has weakened considerably, its remnants are still present in the Israeli consciousness. Many Israelis are already willing to recognize that it is possible to be Jewish outside Israel as well, and yet many still perceive Diaspora Jews through an instrumental prism, as a source of diplomatic, economic, or advocacy support, and not as full partners in the national story.

This difficulty is also connected to the fact that over the past thirty years Israel has increasingly begun to see itself as a “normal” state, whose role is to serve its citizens in terms of economy, security, and welfare. At the same time, a more civic and individual Israeli identity has grown stronger, while the language of mission and shared purpose has weakened. Thus, not only did the connection with Diaspora Jewry loosen; within Israel itself, the national glue also eroded, and in place of a shared story, sectoral and self-interested contention increasingly grew stronger. When Israel forgets that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people, not in a narrow or exclusionary sense, but in a deep historical, cultural, and value-based sense, it not only distances itself from the Diaspora, It also weakens itself from within. In place of a language of purpose and shared belonging, a language of interests and sectoral score-settling appears.

Israel’s strength does not depend only on its military and economic power. It also depends on the character of its social resilience: on the willingness of Israelis, as individuals and as communities, to fight, to make an effort, and to sacrifice for the existence and future of the State of Israel. This willingness cannot rely only on a compulsory draft law or on another kind of coercion. Israel depends on its citizens feeling that they are part of something greater than themselves, and that the state has a meaning that transcends the efficient management of daily life. Israelis, in a certain sense, need once again the sense of the historical role of the State of Israel.

The Jewish people provide Israel with this dimension of meaning. It ties the state to a story broader than its political present and than the fractures within it, and in doing so restores depth to the question of what the Israeli project exists for at all. In this sense, Diaspora Jewry is not an appendix to the Israeli story, but part of it. It reminds us that Israel is not only a political framework, but also an expression of the historical, cultural, and national continuum of an entire people. Therefore, the connection to world Jewry is not a value-based ornament, but a strategic necessity.

Strengthening Israelis’ sense of belonging to the broader Jewish collective is not a privilege, nor even only a value-based choice. It is a condition for strengthening Israel’s sense of purpose, its social resilience, and Israelis’ readiness to take part in building the state and to emerge from the polarizing discourse that characterizes life in Israel.