PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
The Paradoxical Importance of a Terrible Time
By Paul Scham
September 2026
It is by now utterly clichéd to remark that things are terrible. We know that leaders from Trump to Bibi to Putin and not a few others are pursuing policies that are bringing disasters on both intended and accidental victims. Moreover, ideologies and policies that have served us as Jews and as Americans for decades or generations are demonstrating their inability to serve as guides in the current conditions.
This can be PPI’s moment – in that we have for all of our 35 years of existence, questioned and pushed against seemingly established verities. With many American Jews now struggling for a more realistic understanding of Israel, without rejecting it completely, our stance is more comprehensible to many.
Most Jews feel a connection to Israel. This can be experienced as religious, ethnic, family, heritage or otherwise. But anyone with any connection to Judaism must recognize that it is built around an ethnicity with a documented three-millennia connection to the “Land of Israel.”
I use quotation marks because the Land of Israel is in much of Jewish tradition an abstraction, as opposed to the State of Israel, which is real and must be evaluated in real-world terms. And, in those terms, it is running amok under its current government. But it is still the “Jewish state.” And if it is that, then it has a relationship to Jews around the world. But what that relationship should be is not determined at all by our tradition. In fact our tradition is built around exile (diaspora, galut). That was the contribution of Yohanan ben Zakkai and the other rabbis of Yavneh after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. We are still figuring out our relationship to a country that calls itself “the Jewish State.”
Most Jews supported the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and basked in the glorious victory of the Six Day War in 1967. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, such a victory seemed providential, even miraculous. And we understood it as a defensive war. That the entire Arab world was threatening Israel was what we understood. Israel had no choice.
Gradually, over the decades that followed, we learned about Palestinians, and how 700,000 had been dispossessed in 1948. Settlements proliferated. The Oslo peace process failed. Israel seemed uninterested in sharing the Land with a Palestinian state. We began to hear of poisonous, messianic, Jewish supremacist ideologies. October 7, 2023 happened and we were all shocked and angered. But then the war in Gaza began and went on and on and on, with Palestinian casualty figures now over 70,000 and credible claims of genocide that we had to take seriously, whether or not we choose to use the G-word.
As a baby boomer, I lived through most of this (not Israel’s establishment!) and became gripped enough by Israel to abandon my career in law and eventually become a professor of Israel Studies, now retired, specializing in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and also a peace activist in Israel and Washington D.C., where I now live. Since 2017 I have been President of Partners for Progressive Israel, formerly aligned with Meretz, the most leftwing of the “Zionist” parties, and now independent.
PPI recognizes and shares the historic Jewish connection with the land of Israel but like most American Jews today, advocates a different conception of Israel, which should be supportive of the Palestinian demands for a state living in peace with Israel. We also support the ideas for a “Confederation,” between Palestine and Israel, such as those advanced by A Land for All.
An important statement from the heart of the liberal rabbinic leadership was recently published by Rabbi Irwin Kula, President Emeritus of CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Rabbi Kula states what should be obvious but what was transgressed for many years by many, if not most, American Jews and Jewish organizations: [The State of Israel is] “the realization of Jewish political agency and sovereignty – with no special right to exist other than that…. it cannot serve as a vicarious Jewish identity.”
Much of the American Israel establishment has been furiously fighting back against the idea that Jews have a responsibility to oppose wrong-headed Israeli policies, such as government support of the settler terrorism now going on in the West Bank. PPI is dedicated to fighting to “normalize” Israel. It is special for us, but has no right to transgress democratic norms in pursuit of Jewish sovereignty or superiority, which is the underlying policy of the current Netanyahu government.
There is an important shift going on among American Jews with regard to Israel that is bending towards the positions PPI has maintained for years. We support Israel, but that support also means insistence on equality before the law and an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the subjugation of their populations. Israel is no longer threatened by its neighbors; rather, since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, peace with all of them has been on offer – at the price of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. A Palestinian state is the only means to guarantee Israel’s safety
I hope you will support PPI in its fight for the normalization of Israel and of our relationship with it It will be a long struggle but it is necessary and unavoidable.
Paul Scham is President of Partners for Progressive Israel and Director of the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, where he is a Professor of Israel Studies.
