The lead package of the July/August 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs, now available on ForeignAffairs.com, deals with Israel’s domestic and foreign challenges. To complement the individual articles, we decided to ask a broad pool of experts for their take on the state of Israel. As with previous surveys, we approached dozens of authorities with deep specialized expertise relevant to the question at hand, together with a few leading generalists in the field. Participants were asked to state whether they agreed or disagreed with a proposition and to rate their confidence level in their opinion; the answers from those who responded are below:Israel is richer, stronger, and more secure today than at any other point in its history.
Ali Abunimah: Israel is “secure” in a military sense; there is no competing army that can defeat it. But it is suffering from a crisis of regime legitimacy because of its total refusal to grant rights to the millions of Palestinians who live either under its military occupation or as second class citizens in the context of a so-called “Jewish state.”