David J. Butler
Shanie Reichman is not a marginal voice in the American Jewish conversation about Israel.
She leads IPF Atid, the young professionals network of the Israel Policy Forum, a prominent advocate of a negotiated two-state outcome. In a recent Jewish Telegraphic Agency op-ed, Reichman laments what she describes as a growing communal fatalism after Oct. 7. Her core claim is that Jewish leaders who treat the two-state horizon as unrealistic aren’t merely making a mistaken tactical judgment; they are also abandoning Zionism.
Reichman’s claim is sweeping. She argues that doubts about the two-state framework are not merely pragmatic judgments about security or political feasibility. They reflect something deeper and more corrosive: a loss of Zionist faith. To give up on a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian settlement, she suggests, is to give up on Zionism’s defining moral and historical mission. In her telling, older communal leadership has succumbed to fatalism, while young American Jews — her constituency — remain animated by “the audacity of hope.”
It is an emotionally resonant argument. It is also a dangerous one.
Reichman writes out of a very particular institutional location. IPF Atid exists to cultivate young Jews who remain committed to Israel while also committed to Palestinian self-determination. Its programming revolves around dialogue, study tours and policy frameworks meant to keep the two-state vision alive inside a community that has grown increasingly polarized. That mission is legitimate. But it also means that Reichman is professionally invested in preserving the two-state paradigm as a moral north star. Her essay is not just an analysis; it is a defense of her movement’s reason for being.
In her JTA piece, Reichman describes attending a Jewish Federations of North America gathering where communal leaders, even as they honored Yitzhak Rabin’s legacy, informally concluded that a two-state outcome no longer looks realistic. She presents this moment as a kind of betrayal — a renunciation of Zionist courage in favor of despair. Young Jews, she insists, reject that defeatism. Polling data, she argues, shows they want peace, empathy and self-determination for both peoples. To abandon that horizon is, in her framing, to abandon Zionism itself.
This conflation — between skepticism about a specific diplomatic model and abandonment of Zionist identity — is the core error of her argument.
Zionism was never a theology of optimism. It was a political project born of brutal realism.
Theodor Herzl did not convene the First Zionist Congress because he was hopeful about Europe’s future; he did so because he knew it was collapsing. David Ben-Gurion did not declare statehood because peace was at hand; he did so because survival required it. Rabin negotiated not because he believed Palestinian politics had been redeemed, but because he believed Israeli security demanded risk — calibrated, conditional risk.
What Reichman asks today’s Jewish leadership to do is something very different. She asks them to affirm a political outcome — a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel — not because the conditions for it exist, but because young Jews need to believe that it does.
That is not Zionism. That is emotional outsourcing.
The hard reality is that the Palestinian political system is in ruins. Gaza is governed by Hamas, an Iranian-backed Islamist militia that openly seeks Israel’s destruction and demonstrated its intentions on Oct. 7 in the most barbaric terms imaginable. The Palestinian Authority is weak, corrupt and lacks democratic legitimacy even among its own people. No Palestinian leadership exists today that can enforce a peace agreement, disarm militias, or guarantee Israel’s security. These are not talking points; they are facts acknowledged by every serious security analyst in Israel and abroad.
Reichman treats doubts about two states as moral failure. For Israelis who have buried their dead, it looks more like prudence.
Her polling numbers tell us something real: young American Jews want Israel to be both safe and ethical. They want to feel good about their attachment. But desire is not diplomacy. Wanting peace does not conjure a partner for it. Zionism is not strengthened by pretending that intentions substitute for institutions.
There is another sleight of hand in Reichman’s essay. She suggests that rejecting today’s two-state pathway means accepting permanent war. That is false. One can believe deeply in eventual coexistence while recognizing that no viable Palestinian polity currently exists to deliver it. Israel can seek stability, deterrence, economic integration and gradual de-radicalization without granting premature sovereignty to an entity that would almost certainly become another Gaza.
Zionism does not require Jews to close their eyes and hope harder.
The real risk Reichman underestimates is what happens when young Jews are told that Zionism depends on a diplomatic fantasy. When — inevitably — that fantasy collides with reality, the disillusionment will be total. They will not conclude that two states failed. They will conclude that Israel failed them.
Jewish institutions are not obliged to preserve hope at all costs. They are obliged to tell the truth about the strategic environment Israel inhabits. That truth is grim, complicated and morally painful. But it is still the truth.
Zionism has always meant taking responsibility for Jewish power in a dangerous world. It has never meant confusing aspiration with strategy.
Hope matters. But when hope becomes a substitute for hard judgment, it stops being a virtue. It becomes a distraction — and sometimes a liability.
David J. Butler is an attorney. He is president of Dvash Consulting, LLC and a member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, which owns and publishes Washington Jewish Week.
