JERUSALEM, Israel — Rabbi Alexander Hayat is building an unfashionable strategic asset in Jerusalem — and the research center attached to his movement holds the public-opinion data that explains why that asset is needed.
Alexander Hayat, a Jerusalem Orthodox rabbi, has spent the past several years building something Israel today is short of: civic infrastructure designed to outlast the political cycles. His Derech Eretz movement runs grassroots groups in several Israeli cities — Hasidim, national-religious and wholly secular Israelis working in the same rooms — maintains a parliamentary lobby in the Knesset around a bill to legalize neighborhood councils, and operates a Civic Academy for activists. His immediate task points inward: to gather a fractured society into a functioning civic fabric.
But Hayat does not look only inward. The movement has a research center — Dor Moriah — and it tracks how Israelis’ very assumptions about the country’s security are going out of date: the familiar supports those assumptions rested on for decades are failing one after another.
One of them is the “periphery” doctrine of the Ben-Gurion era: an informal alignment with Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia, constructed to circumvent a hostile Arab core. Almost nothing of it remains today. Turkey under Erdoğan behaves not merely as an awkward partner but as a hostile one. Iran has not been removed as a threat — it seeks to maximize the harm it can do to Israel. Ethiopia no longer needs Israel, for security or for technology. And the Abraham Accords mark a shift away from circumventing the Arab core toward working inside it: the Sunni states are no longer the periphery — they are the core.
The collapse of the old system yields a direct conclusion: if the former architecture of bypass alliances has fallen, Israel needs to build a new one — regional blocs constructed within the changed core itself. One contour of such a bloc now under discussion is the so-called hexagonal alliance, a new architecture of stability for the Middle East. This is the logical next step: the death of the periphery doctrine is not a dead end but a demand to move to alliances of a new type.
But this is precisely where the gap opens. A nationally representative survey conducted by the movement’s research center together with Geocartography in April 2026 (1,013 respondents, margin of error ±3.1%) shows that Israeli society is not taking that next step — it recognizes neither the necessity of new alliances nor their possibility. Only 18.6 percent of Israelis consider it at all realistic that by 2030 the country could conduct an independent regional policy — meaning that almost no one believes in the very possibility of a new bloc.
A further 40.5 percent still expect, above all, closer alignment with the United States rather than the construction of a regional architecture of Israel’s own; the option of diversifying foreign policy drew 6.0 percent — society does not feel the need for new partnerships. The periphery doctrine is dead, but the transition to whatever should replace it has not been made in the public mind.
Dor Moriah’s analysts call this cognitive lag: a society goes on thinking inside an outdated frame long after that frame has lost contact with reality. And here Hayat’s two lines of sight — inward and outward — converge on a single conclusion. Risks of this order cannot be met by a society divided against itself; only a people in solidarity can hold its ground before a hostile environment. For Hayat, solidarity is not a moral slogan but a condition of survival.
New alliances can be built only when their bearer is a people in solidarity, not a fractured society. A lagging, divided consciousness cannot be repaired by technology or by diplomacy — it can be repaired only by institutions that give citizens back a shared and accurate picture of their country.
Israel has few such institutions. Those it once had — the parties, the labor movement, the kibbutz federations, the absorption agencies — were built for a country that no longer exists. The Knesset has become an arena of fragmentation rather than a producer of strategic consensus. Hayat’s movement is one of the few formats that conducts serious analytical work in Hebrew, Russian and English, runs a parliamentary lobby in the Knesset, and maintains a network of urban groups backed by a legislative project that gives citizens working channels of participation.
The electorate Derech Eretz rests on is the Russian-speaking million: Israelis who arrived from the former Soviet Union over the past three decades, roughly a sixth of the country’s Jewish population. Hayat treats it not as a party bloc, and not as the backbone of the secular right, but as an underused reservoir of human and intellectual capital. He sees the movement’s function as building the institutional channels through which that capital can work for Israel as a whole. The platform is citizenship, not identity.
In the context of the strategic data, this electorate matters in a way that American Jewish institutions have not yet grasped. Forty percent of Israelis expect closer alignment with Washington, six percent are open to diversification, and fewer than twenty percent are prepared to imagine an independent regional alignment. The movement argues that Israeli society has not fully absorbed how dramatically the strategic environment has changed.
A civic movement that carries a more accurate picture of the country into the daily life of thousands of active participants, publishes it in three languages, and builds legislative channels so that citizens can act on it — that, in the strict sense, is a strategic asset.
Three observations follow from this.
First: Israel’s security is habitually thought about, from the outside, through Washington — the alliance relationship, work with Congress, military aid. But those are instruments for an external problem, and Dor Moriah’s data show that the country’s most acute problem over the coming decade is internal. Dependence on the United States is not in question: 40.5 percent of Israelis expect it to deepen. What is in question is society’s ability to see its own position soberly, and that awareness has fallen out of step with the surrounding world.
Second: the way Rabbi Hayat works is itself worth noting. Religious authority in Israeli public life more often stays turned toward its own community. Hayat, a Haredi rabbi, works not only with the religious — he is building a dialogue with secular Israelis as well, and doing so with instruments uncommon for a religious figure: from a parliamentary lobby to a grassroots civic movement. This is not unique in itself, but in the Israeli religious landscape, it is rarely encountered.
