Israel stands as a rare nation forged in history’s worst hate and persecution. It is fiercely devoted to timeless principles. From its biblical roots as a light unto the nations to its modern rebirth, Israel has embodied the enduring values of freedom, morality, and truth.
Israel is the world’s only country where an ancient people returned to their ancestral homeland after millennia of exile, building a vibrant democracy that guarantees rights to all citizens, Jew and Arab alike, amid hostile surroundings. While countries around Israel are ruled by tyrants who deny their people any freedom, Israel upheld the moral courage to defend life, speak truth against tyranny, and champion liberty in a region often ruled by despotism. Its very existence testifies that ancient ideals can thrive in the modern age.
The fidelity Israel shows in championing freedom, reason, and human rights is why Western countries dedicated to the same values, especially the United States, stand alongside it. More than similar strategic goals and common enemies, the US-Israel relationship is founded on shared values.
Western liberal values rest on the conviction that every human being possesses inherent dignity and equal moral worth. This insight, forged across centuries from Athenian citizenship and Roman law to Judaic teachings on the imago Dei and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, produced the core triad: individual liberty, the rule of law, and government by consent. Rather than granting rights as privileges from kings or collectives, these traditions insist that rights precede the state and limit its power. Free speech, private property, religious liberty, and due process are not optional luxuries but necessary conditions for persons to pursue truth, virtue, and happiness without arbitrary coercion.
Modern Western democracies institutionalize their values through constitutional limits, separation of powers, and regular elections, creating space for pluralism while protecting minorities from majority tyranny. Markets, civil society, and independent courts further disperse authority, preventing any single faction, state, church, or mob, from claiming total dominion.
The result is a fragile but resilient order that trusts fallible individuals to govern themselves, rewards initiative and debate, and remains open to self-correction. This order makes freedom not just a preference, but the indispensable foundation of human flourishing.
AT THE other end of the liberal spectrum sits Progressive philosophy. Progressivism emerges from the belief that history moves toward greater equality, rationality and emancipation, but only when conscious human intervention dismantles inherited hierarchies.
Rooted in Enlightenment optimism yet radicalized by 19th- and 20th-century critiques of industrial capitalism, racial domination, and patriarchal tradition, progressivism sees existing institutions, family norms, property relations, national borders, even constitutional restraints, as historically contingent barriers to justice rather than timeless truths. Freedom, in this view, is not negative (freedom from coercion) but positive: the collective capacity to reshape society so that every identity and group achieves recognition and material security.
Progressivism defines itself as inherently anti-establishment. Yesterday’s reform becomes today’s entrenched privilege. The moment a cause wins power, it risks calcifying into a new orthodoxy. Perpetual critique of “the system” and whoever currently holds it, is therefore not a tactic but the essence of the creed. To be progressive is to stand with the marginalized against whatever structure presently marginalizes them, trusting that relentless disruption, guided by empathy and expertise, will bend the moral arc further toward inclusion.
Like any political philosophy, liberalism and progressivism are neither inherently good nor bad. The philosophies’ benefits or harm to humankind are dependent on how they are used. Good people will apply Western liberal values and progressivism’s inherent anti-establishment nature to improve people’s lives. Bad people will distort these philosophies to harm people and the world around them.
A curious phenomenon seen throughout the world is the progressive movement’s opposition to Israel and Zionism. As a movement and nation dedicated to freedom and human rights, progressive politicians, leaders, and adherents should be Israel’s greatest supporters. There are progressives who understand this and do support Israel, like American Congressmen Ritchie Torres and Jake Auchincloss. Unfortunately, their support of Israel is the exception among progressives, not the rule.
PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISTS’ anti-establishment philosophy leads them to reflexively view Israel, a powerful country that governs a weak minority, as oppressors and part of “the system” they wish to overthrow. They consider Israel’s power more than its democratic values, and weigh Israel’s opponents’ (the Palestinians) weaknesses more than the tyranny and corruption they refuse to change.
In the superficial calculus progressives too often employ, Israel is powerful, thereby evil and needing reform or eradication, and Palestinians are weak, and therefore righteous and deserve global support. As a powerful government, Israel is labeled “the establishment” or “the system.” This marks Israel for opposition.
Progressives employing a superficial calculus to brand Israel evil face a challenge; with just a little scrutiny, it is clear that Israel shares many of the values that progressives themselves hold dear: and Palestinians abhor – and violently oppose – many progressive values. To overcome this challenge, many progressives use moral relativism to try to sidestep Israel’s honorable values. They will often claim Israel perverts progressive values to whitewash its crime of power and being part of the system.
For decades, Islamist movements have studied the West like chess grandmasters, and they’ve found the progressive Left’s blind spot. While sincere activists march for every conceivable identity, gender, race, and sexuality, Islamists quietly discovered the perfect Trojan horse. Wrap your cause in the language of “marginalized voices,” “intersectionality,” and “resistance to power,” and Western institutions will not only open the gates, they’ll hand you the keys.
The same progressives who rightly exposed real injustices now unwittingly provide cover for radicals who reject every value the Left claims to cherish: women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, secular democracy. Moral confusion isn’t just a bug in progressive politics; for Islamists, it’s the feature they exploit best.
When the need to destroy establishment institutions is combined with moral relativism and Islamists’ perversion of true progressive values, a toxic blend bleeds into society distorting good-meaning people’s sense of reality and feeding evil people’s efforts to pervert established norms.
Progressives with an accurate sense of Israel’s commitment to freedom, morality, and human rights need to take a stand and educate other progressives about Israel – and publicly call out the anti-Israel progressives who slander Israel with their lies.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and the author of Zionism Today.