As Israelis prepare to go to the polls in October, Prof. Uriel Reichman says the question is bigger than who will form the next government: it’s about what kind of Jewish state Israel intends to be, and whether the country keeps faith with the Declaration of Independence or slides toward a religious model built to concentrate power.
The State’s Monopoly
Reichman, founding president and chairman of the Board of Reichman University, wrote that the fight didn’t begin with the judicial overhaul initiated in 2023 and won’t end with the coming elections. He said it has been unfolding for decades, rooted in competing visions of Zionism and the identity of the State of Israel. That’s the polite version. Underneath it sits the same old machinery: who gets to define authority, who gets to obey, and who gets crushed when the state decides its own rules are above everyone else’s.
He pointed to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and said Israel never fully confronted it. The morning after Rabin was murdered, he recalled, hundreds of students gathered outside the university’s administration building, their eyes red from tears and a sleepless night, to light memorial candles. Reichman said he spoke to them about the Rabin he had known and about the stain the assassination would leave on Israel’s history. He said it would be a mistake to focus only on the assassin, Yigal Amir, and argued that Israel had to examine the ideological environment that made the murder possible.
That environment, he wrote, included extremist elements within the religious settlement movement. He said some rabbis invoked the halachic doctrine of moser, defined as “a Jew who informs on fellow Jews or delivers their lives or property into the hands of hostile authorities.” Under halachic law, he wrote, a moser may be killed, and a Jew who kills him is considered to have performed a mitzvah. Reichman said Amir later stated that he had received rabbinic authorization to regard Rabin as a moser. He also wrote that leading rabbinic authorities, including the Chazon Ish and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, had ruled that the moser doctrine had no place in the sovereign State of Israel.
From Occupation to Internal War
Reichman said the roots of this ideological transformation reach back to the Six-Day War. As a paratrooper officer, he remembered hearing Motta Gur announce, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” He wrote that many Israelis, secular and religious alike, felt they had reconnected with the biblical sites of Jewish history. Most, he said, saw the war as an extraordinary military achievement, won through blood, courage, sacrifice and comradeship, and did not regard settlement throughout the territories as a religious obligation.
But another current took hold. Inspired by Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohaen Kook and developed by his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, it saw the war as a decisive stage in the divine process of redemption. That worldview gave rise to Gush Emunim, which regarded settlement throughout the biblical Land of Israel as a religious commandment and viewed the Six-Day War and the settlement enterprise as expressions of divine will. Reichman wrote that this outlook raised the question of the limits of obedience to the state when its decisions conflicted with the commandment to settle the Land.
Over time, he said, part of the movement underwent a deeper transformation. Increasingly, some held the state lacked legitimate authority whenever it conflicted with the redemptive vision. Following the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, he wrote, this evolution accelerated. For some, the evacuation violated a divine commandment to “inherit the Land.” Among influential religious educators, particularly within the Bnei David pre-military academy and circles associated with the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, a new constitutional vision gained ground.
Their objective, he wrote, was not merely to influence public policy but to reshape the state itself, replacing a Jewish and democratic state with one whose constitution is the Torah, while building the political, educational and public power needed to advance that goal. That’s not a side debate. It’s a struggle over who owns the apparatus.
The NGO Mirage of Reform
Reichman said the judicial overhaul proposed in 2023 must be understood against that background. It reflects, he wrote, a much deeper debate over the source of Israel’s authority: whether it should remain faithful to the vision embodied in the Declaration of Independence or move toward a fundamentally different, religious model. He wrote that in this conception, democracy is understood primarily as majority rule, while judicial independence, checks and balances, and the protection of minority rights are treated as obstacles to establishing a halachic state.
He framed the Declaration of Independence as the original contract, citing its pledge to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and to guarantee “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.” He wrote that the architects of modern Zionism — from Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion — rejected the idea of a theocratic state and envisioned a Jewish state that would be democratic, committed to liberty, equality and the rule of law.
That’s the reformist promise, anyway. Reichman said the judicial overhaul seeks to alter the very essence of the State of Israel and depart from the vision of Zionism embodied in the Declaration of Independence. He ended by saying the coming elections offer Israelis an opportunity not merely to choose another government but to reaffirm the national commitment to the values on which the state was founded and finally provide them with the constitutional framework they deserve.
The essay, adapted from his address at the 2026 Herzliya Conference, leaves the usual institutions standing in the doorway, pretending they can arbitrate a conflict that is really about the state deciding which version of itself gets to rule. The ballot box gets its turn. The machinery stays in place.