Israel at a Crossroads

Former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg has published a critical reflection on Israel’s present and future, raising the difficult question of whether the state can continue to claim moral legitimacy. Writing in his Substack, Burg draws on more than two decades of commentary, recalling his earlier warning that democracy in Israel was “dying on the hilltops of the occupied territories.” He argues that the trajectory of the past half-century, compounded by the events since October 7, has brought the state to a point of existential crisis.

From Democratic Vision to Moral Crisis

Burg contrasts Israel’s early years as a fledgling democracy—marked by fragile peace efforts, welfare programs, and an active civil society—with what he describes as today’s disintegrating social fabric. He contends that the current government has turned Gaza into a humanitarian catastrophe, carried out deliberate policies of displacement, and eroded the ethical foundations on which Israel was built.

Divided Societies

The essay characterizes contemporary Israel as fractured into four distinct communities, held together largely by war:

• Ultra-Orthodox communities, accused of prioritizing exemptions and funding while remaining detached from national sacrifice.

• National-religious Zionists, whose military service and messianic worldview, Burg argues, fuel a perpetual conflict.

• Secular Israelis, described as bearing the state’s economic and military burden but politically weakened and fragmented.

• Palestinian citizens of Israel, who, despite ongoing discrimination, have resisted opening another internal front even as Gaza suffers devastation.

A Call for a New Social Contract

To Burg, the question of whether the Israeli project has failed is an attempt to name the gulf between founding ideals and current realities. He writes:

“A state that systematically denies rights to millions, that justifies mass killing as a security strategy, and that elevates Jewish supremacy and inequality to the level of ideology, such a state may no longer claim moral legitimacy. Perhaps the Israel that has severed itself from its founding values and now stands in defiance of the very international norms that brought it into being, has lost the right to exist.”

Rejecting despair or calls for destruction, Burg insists the only way forward is to establish a new covenant of equal citizenship in which Jews and Arabs live together not as enemies, rulers, or ruled, but as partners who commit to “Never Again” for both peoples. Without such a fundamental transformation, he concludes, Israel faces the reality that the project may be “truly over—and perhaps, justly so.”

Read more here: Israel. Is the Game Over?