On April 16, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted political theorist Tomer Persico for the 20th installment of its Israel Insights webinar series. Persico, a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and Senior Research Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, joined Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP,  and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, to trace liberalism's surprising roots in Zionism's founding — including the once-overlooked fact that Menachem Begin's Herut party, not the ruling socialist left, was Israel's most consistent liberal force in its early decades — through its 1990s peak and into its present crisis. Persico argued that liberalism's troubles stem not from failure but from success: having become "the only game in town" after the Soviet collapse, it lost the ideological competitors that once distracted from its core weakness, namely that liberalism is an arrangement rather than a story, and cannot tell people who they are or where they belong. That vacuum, he said, is now filled by populism on the right and identitarian politics on the left, and in Israel, by religious fundamentalism.

Pressed by Magen on whether liberalism can defend itself against illiberal threats — from autonomy's corrosion of community to AI's challenge to human-centered politics — Persico argued that liberalism must be paired with complementary sources of meaning, such as tradition, religion, and nationalism, rather than trying to supply its own story. Turning to Israel's coming elections, he criticized Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, calling them fundamentalists pursuing a theocratic "halachic state," and argued the Likud has shifted from a liberal to a populist party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since 2015. He said the liberal camp must reclaim patriotism and Judaism itself from the religious right, rather than cede both. "We can have authentic, real Judaism as secular people, or as liberal religious people," he said, warning that failing to do so risks producing "a Jewish Iran."