Prof. Uriel Reichman, founding president and chairman of the Board of Reichman University, has framed Israel's October elections as a referendum not on government composition but on the nation's fundamental identity — whether it will remain faithful to the democratic vision of its founding or move toward a religious model that subordinates civil rights to theological authority.
In an essay adapted from his address at the 2026 Herzliya Conference, Reichman argued the question didn't begin with the judicial overhaul initiated in 2023 and won't end at the ballot box. It's been unfolding for decades, he wrote, rooted in competing visions of Zionism and the identity of the State of Israel.
The Unhealed Wound of Rabin's Assassination
Reichman returned to a national trauma that Israel never fully confronted: the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 31 years ago. He recalled the morning after Rabin was murdered, when hundreds of students gathered outside the university's administration building, their eyes red from tears and a sleepless night, to light memorial candles. He spoke to them about the Rabin he had known and about the stain the assassination would leave on Israel's history.
It would be a mistake to focus solely on the assassin, Yigal Amir, Reichman wrote. Israel had to examine the ideological environment that made the murder possible. Under the banner of national unity, the country largely avoided that reckoning, leaving the ideological roots of the assassination largely unexamined. The Oslo Accords were the subject of legitimate public debate, but among some extremist elements within the religious settlement movement, opposition went beyond politics. Certain rabbis invoked the halachic doctrine of moser — "a Jew who informs on fellow Jews or delivers their lives or property into the hands of hostile authorities." Under halachic law, a moser may be killed, and a Jew who kills him is considered to have performed a mitzvah. Amir later stated that he had received rabbinic authorization to regard Rabin as a moser. 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 the Six-Day War to Gush Emunim
The roots of that ideological transformation reach back to the Six-Day War 59 years ago. As a paratrooper officer, Reichman remembered hearing Motta Gur announce, "The Temple Mount is in our hands." Many Israelis, secular and religious alike, felt they'd reconnected with the biblical sites of Jewish history. Most Israelis saw the war as an extraordinary military achievement, won through blood, courage, sacrifice and comradeship, and didn't regard settlement throughout the territories as a religious obligation.
Another current, inspired by Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook and developed by his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, saw the war as a decisive stage in the divine process of redemption. This 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.
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, part of the movement underwent a deeper transformation. Increasingly some held the state lacked legitimate authority whenever it conflicted with the redemptive vision.
The Disengagement and the Rise of a New Constitutional Vision
Following the disengagement from Gaza 21 years ago, 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 wasn't 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 this goal.
In this conception, democracy is understood primarily as majority rule. Judicial independence, checks and balances, and the protection of minority rights aren't regarded as essential features of democratic government but as obstacles to establishing a halachic state.
The Judicial Overhaul as Constitutional Rupture
The judicial overhaul proposed in 2023 must be understood against this background, Reichman wrote. It reflects 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.
Political theory continues to rest on Aristotle's foundational insight that it isn't the role of the state to enforce ideological or social unity. The purpose of the state is to enable people with different beliefs and convictions to live together while promoting stability, openness and moderation as guiding values.
The architects of modern Zionism — from Theodor Herzl and Ze'ev Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion — rejected the idea of a theocratic state. They envisioned a Jewish state that would be democratic, committed to liberty, equality and the rule of law. The Declaration of Independence captured that synthesis, establishing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people while pledging to "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex" and guaranteeing "freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture."
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, Reichman argued. 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. Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state depends on it.
Why This Matters:
Reichman's essay frames the October elections as a choice between two incompatible visions of Israeli statehood — one grounded in democratic pluralism and equality before the law, the other in religious authority that subordinates civil rights to theological interpretation. His warning carries particular weight given Israel's failure to reckon with the ideological currents that produced Rabin's assassination 31 years ago. The judicial overhaul initiated in 2023 isn't a technical reform but a constitutional rupture that would concentrate power, weaken minority protections, and move Israel away from the democratic commitments enshrined in its founding document. For those who believe Israel's legitimacy rests on its promise of equal citizenship regardless of religion or ethnicity, the stakes couldn't be higher. The question isn't whether Israel will remain Jewish — that's not in dispute — but whether it will remain a democracy that protects the rights of all its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.