I am 85 years old. I have been a Zionist my entire life. And I find myself increasingly unable to defend an Israel that has abandoned the vision that made it worth defending.

This is not a comfortable admission. It offers no political home — too Zionist for the Jewish left, too critical for the Jewish right. But it is honest, and honesty is what the current moment demands.

When Israel was established in 1948, it carried a weight that no other nation in modern history has carried — the weight of Jewish history, Jewish suffering, and Jewish moral aspiration compressed into a single political act. For American Jews of my generation, Israel was not merely a refuge, though God knows it needed to be that. It was something more: the opportunity, after two millennia of exile, to demonstrate what a polity shaped by prophetic values could actually look like.

Not a theocracy. Not a utopia. But a nation that took seriously the ancient demand that Jewish collective life carry a moral vocation that ordinary nationalism does not. Or Lagoyim — a light unto the nations — was not a piece of liturgical decoration. It was a covenantal obligation embedded in the deepest layer of Jewish self-understanding. We knew, from the long history of prior Jewish commonwealths, how catastrophically Jewish political life could fail. The founders knew it too. The hope was that this time, informed by that history and forged in the furnace of the Holocaust, would be different.

For a generation, it appeared it might be.

The Israel of the founding decades was deeply flawed, as all human enterprises are. Its treatment of Mizrahi Jews by the Ashkenazi Labor establishment was often condescending and discriminatory. Its relationship with its Arab citizens was complicated and frequently unjust. Its security needs drove decisions that compromised its values. None of this is forgotten or minimized.

But beneath the flaws there was a discernible trajectory — a shared national narrative about what Israel was ultimately for, beyond mere survival. Labor Zionism, for all its internal contradictions, carried a genuine moral seriousness. The kibbutz ideal, however romanticized in American Jewish memory, represented a real attempt to build collective life on principles of equality and shared purpose. The legal and cultural institutions of the early state reflected an aspiration, however imperfectly realized, toward a society that took justice seriously.

Yitzhak Rabin embodied this trajectory in its final........

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