Guest
Essay
Israelis
Must Choose a Secular Nation or Theocracy
Oct. 15,
2026
Credit...Ilia
Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Garry
Kasparov
Mr.
Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/opinion/israel-elections-ultra-orthodox-jewish.html
Democracies
are built on compromise. But sometimes a compromise can turn dangerous.
I see
this dynamic at play in two democracies with which I closely identify: the
United States and Israel. When I was a boy growing up behind the Iron Curtain,
America was an icon of liberty to me. As a young Soviet with a Jewish father, I
grew up to become a staunch supporter of Israel, an outpost of liberalism
surrounded by illiberal, Moscow-backed Arab states.
While I
rejected the anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism of the Communist regime under
which I was raised, I also sought a textured understanding of the United States
and Israel. I learned early on that the United States had reached a breaking
point just 84 years after independence. America’s founders included men who
owned slaves and men who did not. They could not both midwife the union and
challenge the “peculiar institution.” This guaranteed the birth of the United
States but cursed the young nation with an affliction that nearly caused a
permanent rupture.
With
elections just weeks away, Israelis find themselves at a similar juncture.
Nearly eight decades ago, at the time of Israel’s establishment, the nation’s
early leaders made a pact with the ultra-Orthodox, granting them special
privileges. The pact haunted their descendants and today is sustained by a
nationalist far right and an unscrupulous prime minister willing to bend the
law to stay in power.
There is,
of course, no moral equivalence between the Haredim, as the ultra-Orthodox are
called in Israel, and slave owners. In the case of the United States, the
compromise of allowing the evil of slavery was incompatible with a free
society, whereas a religious lifestyle can coexist with democracy. In Israel
today, however, ultra-Orthodox political power is corroding the social compact
that holds the country together.
When
Israeli voters head to the polls this month, one of the many choices they will
face is whether the Jewish state leans in the direction of a secular Hebrew
republic or a rigid rabbinical theocracy.
The
ultra-Orthodox Haredim account for about 14 percent of Israel’s population.
They nonetheless influence many aspects of daily life and benefit from generous
public funding, exemptions from military service and disproportionate clout in
the Knesset, the Parliament.
The roots
of this influence can be traced back to Israel’s earliest days. In the shadow
of the Holocaust, David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state’s first prime minister,
made a deal with the ultra-Orthodox. The Haredim, whose communities had been
devastated in the Nazi genocide, would not have to send a group of their sons
to fight in the Israel Defense Forces. Further, the state would observe certain
Jewish religious laws. In exchange, the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox would buy
into his state-building project. Many Haredim did not support the establishment
of a secular Jewish state. They objected to the secular nationalism of Israel’s
founders and believed the Messiah should return to Earth before Jews returned
en masse to Palestine.
Israelis
of Ben-Gurion’s generation might not have understood the kind of foundation
they were laying. They might have presumed they were simply handing out draft
exemptions to a few hundred young men. Many of the American founders similarly
expected slavery to peter out over time.
Instead,
slavery expanded significantly after 1776, just as religious influence in
Israel exploded in the decades after 1948. The draft exemption became
especially infuriating to secular Israeli Jews after Oct. 7 and the war in
Gaza. And that’s not the only way ultra-Orthodox influence has grown toxic.
Life-cycle
events for all Israelis, from marriages and divorces to funerals, are tightly
controlled by the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate. For same-sex and interfaith
ceremonies or for Israelis whose Jewishness is simply not recognized by the
rabbinate, weddings are often conducted in Europe. Israel’s temporal
authorities recognize these marriages, but the fact that they must happen
abroad is a severe imposition by the Jewish state’s religious leadership.
Access to
many public services is restricted on Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, even though
millions of Israelis are not observant.
The
ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset are so single-minded that it seems they
will support anyone, no matter how clouded by accusations of misdeeds, who
preserves their special privileges. This is how the Haredim have become
indispensable accomplices to and supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s far-right coalition.
In short:
Without the ultra-Orthodox, Mr. Netanyahu would not have backing for many of
his authoritarian endeavors, such as his effort to suppress judicial
independence or fire the country’s independent attorney general. Without Mr.
Netanyahu, the ultra-Orthodox would lose their protected status. The Haredim
have few friends outside his coalition, and even among the right they are
losing support. Prominent members of the prime minister’s party, like Yuli
Edelstein, have left because they do not support aspects of the ultra-Orthodox
monopoly. The center-right opposition is campaigning on lifting the military
exemption of the Haredim once and for all.
Other
democracies have found themselves afflicted by the compromises made by their
early leaders. Canada’s British founders brought the Quebecois into the fold by
making significant concessions on linguistic and religious freedom, only for
the federal government to face recurring secession crises among
independence-minded French speakers. In Bosnia, with its decentralized system
of ethnic enclaves, a system created to end one war might lead to another.
When I
was growing up in the Soviet Union, Communist thugs enforced atheism and
suppressed Jewish culture. This is not what I want for Israel. I simply believe
in equality before the law and an Israel that embodies its founders’
aspirations of being a “light unto the nations,” rather than an international
pariah held back by far-right and religious special interests.
Just as
Abraham Lincoln observed that the government could not persist “half slave and
half free,” Israel cannot go on half theocratic and half secular. Americans
resolved that contradiction over four years of brutal civil war. Israel’s
election on Oct. 27 offers a bloodless way out of this morass.
Garry
Kasparov is a former world chess champion and Russian political dissident. He
is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and the publisher of The Next Move on
Substack.
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