Back at my desk in Jerusalem, after twelve gut-wrenching days of war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, I find myself struggling to return to “normal.” The sirens have stopped (for now), but the emotional aftershocks linger. Like many Israelis, I’m still processing what we’ve just endured: a harrowing confrontation that revealed just how deeply we live with existential danger.
And yet, a remarkable truth about Israeli society has resurfaced: when faced with great threats, we come together. Despite our deep political divisions, we show resilience and solidarity. We stood behind our security forces, adhered to severe restrictions—no work, no mobility, no travel—and rediscovered our capacity for unity. In some ways, it felt like the early days of COVID—only this time, it wasn’t a crisis our government was responding to, but a war it initiated.
Our wartime solidarity is reassuring, but I fear that it may also be a lid teetering on a bubbling cauldron of political polarization threatening to boil over.
We have shown that, when faced with the threat of the Iranian regime, we are capable of extraordinary things: vision, imagination, courage, determination, mutual responsibility, and generosity. Why is it, then, that these very same capacities seem out of reach when it comes to confronting the political polarization tearing at the fabric of Israeli society?
The contrast is striking—and deeply troubling. Why can we rise together in moments of external danger yet falter in the face of our internal divides?
Mind you, dispute is healthy—even necessary—in any democracy. But polarization is toxic when it erodes our ability to listen, to compromise, to imagine a shared future. At its most dangerous, polarization causes people to prefer harming “the other side”—even at the cost of harming the country—rather than cooperating across lines.
The months leading up to October 7 were a sad textbook case for toxic polarization in Israel. In just one example, in March 2023, IDF reservists threatened to stop volunteering in protest of the government’s judicial overhaul. The government, in turn, ignored warnings from security officials and pressed ahead, deepening the divide.
Each side in this internal conflict believes that the opposing side’s actions make Israel weaker before the attack from Gaza, and, moreover, each side claims that Hamas’ knowledge of this weakness precipitated the timing of the attack.
In Israel’s polarized paradigm, it’s possible to identify two ideological camps:
Each accuses the other of blindness, cowardice, or betrayal. Few truly try to listen or bridge the divides. No individual person is completely one or the other, but this is the basic paradigm.
Polarization isn’t unique to Israel. Research shows that affective polarization—negative emotions toward people of opposing political views—is on the rise, both in Israel and in the U.S. What has changed is not necessarily what people believe, but how strongly they feel it: distrust, fear, and hatred for the other side are mounting and loyalty to one’s own camp is deepening.
I had naively assumed that shared trauma—like war—would ease these tensions. And indeed, in Israel we’ve witnessed extraordinary acts of care that transcend political divides in moments of grief and crisis. Yet even so, the trenches remain.
Where do we go from here?
Instead of clinging to polarizing models that lock us into fixed political identities—identities that come with pre-packaged answers ending in exclamation points for every issue—we must invite a courageous examination of the roots of our identity, values, and sense of belonging.
This kind of study and exploration can open the space we need to imagine a new and hopeful vision—one we aspire to and work toward—rather than remaining trapped in cycles of resistance and toxic confrontation.
Because in truth, most of us—on both sides of the Israeli divide—want the same basic things: We want the hostages home. We want our children to be safe. We want a fair justice system and public institutions that serve the people. We want a Jewish identity that is meaningful and relevant—and the freedom to express it in ways that reflect our values and our lives.
At the Shalom Hartman Institute, I lead a program called Mishmeret, which invites civic and business leaders to overcome the dangers of affective polarization by investing less energy in what we’re fighting against, and more energy in identifying our shared values and aims and building the society we hope to live in.
Participants explore Jewish texts and moral questions. They listen to competing narratives. They challenge themselves—and one another—to break away from well-versed slogans, move beyond our echo chambers, and ask tougher questions.
One participant—a senior public official—recently told me how profoundly the program shifted her perspective. For the first time, she was able to see the illiberal edges of her own liberalism. She is still struggling to find new ideological anchors, but she listens more carefully than she did before. She understands that the counter-perspective is thoughtful, grounded in facts and morality, and deserves consideration. She asks different questions. This type of openness—pausing, reflecting, asking rather than rushing to answer—is essential to the work of shaping a shared vision.
I recently heard another participant—a secular media commentator known for critiquing religious coercion—respond to a question about Israel’s past by quoting the Bible. In Israel’s public sphere, it’s rare and powerful for a secular Israeli to reference a biblical text. In that moment, she modeled something powerful: the Israeli story doesn’t have to be either liberal-universal or Jewish-traditional. It can be both.
We, the team leading Mishmeret, envision a society inspired by the example of these two senior women leaders in the Israeli public sphere — women who dare to listen deeply, think independently, and speak beyond the confines of divisive political paradigms. Their leadership embodies the possibility of a new kind of discourse: one that embraces complexity, fosters solidarity, and nurtures hope.
Through their voices, we glimpse a future where public conversation is not a battleground of camps, but a shared space for values, identity, and collective responsibility. A society where disagreement is not a threat, but a foundation for growth; where commitment to the common good transcends factional interests.
As the novelist Astrid Lindgren once said: “Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.”
You care about Israel, peoplehood, and vibrant, ethical Jewish communities. We do too.
Join our email list for more Hartman ideas
