Zionism was built by leaders who converted scarcity into sovereignty. As its institutional budgets expand, the movement must confront a difficult question: are growing administrative structures strengthening its mission – or quietly weakening it at a moment of historic vulnerability?
Zionism was not built in comfort. It was not built in stability; it was not built by leaders who mistook structure for strategy. It was built by people who understood urgency.
That is why the recent expansion of the Zionist institutional framework deserves more than polite approval. The World Zionist Congress oversees roughly NIS 1.5 billion – approximately $400 million – across the ecosystem of national institutions. The World Zionist Organization’s 2026 framework approaches NIS 284m. More than 20 departments now operate within this structure. Institutional budgets have expanded significantly in recent agreements.
The issue is not the existence of a budget: The issue is its architecture.
Consider the allocation patterns inside individual departments. In multiple cases, annual budgets exceed NIS 3m., yet only approximately NIS 400,000 is directed toward actual programmatic “activities.”
The remainder – often well over 80% – is allocated to human resources and operational costs. Departments responsible for combating antisemitism, promoting Hebrew language and resilience, conducting Zionist hasbara (public diplomacy) in the Diaspora, or strengthening Jewish identity devote the overwhelming majority of their budgets to internal staffing structures rather than outward-facing impact.
In any serious enterprise, that ratio would trigger immediate restructuring. When 85-90% of a unit’s resources fund payroll and only a small fraction reaches measurable output, leadership does not call it growth – it calls it drift.
The pattern extends beyond departments. Nearly half of the total expenditure is allocated to central activities and services – finance, legal, HR, executive secretariat, communications, branding, offices, and institutional infrastructure. In practical terms, roughly half the total budget is consumed before a single classroom is reached, a single campus initiative launched, or a single Hebrew immersion program expanded.
Overhead is not inherently problematic – every organization requires structure. But every business leader understands a basic rule: overhead must remain subordinate to production. When overhead expands faster than output, the model is inverted. Investors lose confidence. Donors demand transparency. Boards ask difficult questions. Zionism cannot afford to wait for that correction.
This is not about individuals: It is about incentives. When departments are created through coalition balancing and representational agreements, expansion becomes a function of internal equilibrium rather than external urgency. Activity budgets are compressed to accommodate structural growth. Staffing layers expand first; measurable impact is expected to follow. That logic is questionable in times of calm, but it is dangerous in the world we inhabit now.
Ideological urgency vs. administrative expansion
October 7 did more than expose security vulnerabilities. It exposed the fragility of Zionism’s ideological infrastructure in the Diaspora. The global reaction – across campuses, media platforms, and political institutions – revealed that Zionism is contested not only militarily, but culturally and intellectually.
October 7 accelerated something deeper than geopolitical instability. It sharpened what may be called the new Jewish question of legitimacy. For generations, the Jewish question centered on belonging – whether Jews could integrate, assimilate, or survive in exile.
Today, the question posed in academic departments, activist movements, and political spaces is different: whether Jewish sovereignty itself is legitimate. Whether Zionism is colonialism. Whether the Jewish state deserves moral standing. “Decolonization” rhetoric and intersectional frameworks increasingly cast Israel not as a nation-state among nations, but as a moral anomaly.
In such an environment, institutional resource allocation cannot be neutral. A movement facing a coordinated challenge to its legitimacy must prioritize ideological infrastructure, education, digital engagement, and cultural resilience. Administrative expansion cannot substitute for narrative defense.
Our adversaries are not investing in overhead: They are investing in ideology. They fund youth mobilization networks. They fund digital narrative campaigns. They fund academic influence. They fund reputational warfare. They understand that the battlefield is cultural as much as military. At such a moment, budget architecture becomes strategy.
Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress within a year of publishing Der Judenstaat. He did so without sovereign guarantees or institutional permanence. His focus was execution. Ben-Gurion, facing existential war, dissolved competing militias into a unified national army because fragmentation endangered survival. Jabotinsky’s “wall of iron” was not a rhetorical flourish – it was a doctrine of disciplined readiness.
They disagreed on ideology. What they shared was alignment between resources and urgency. Zionism succeeded because it converted scarcity into focus. It subordinated internal politics to national survival. It built sovereignty from fragmentation by concentrating power where it mattered. The question now is whether institutional Zionism retains that instinct.
Imagine if even a fraction of administrative expansion were redirected toward measurable Hebrew fluency programs across North America, scalable campus defense initiatives, AI-driven Zionist educational platforms capable of competing in digital spaces, rapid-response media teams trained in ideological engagement, structured aliyah pipelines, and leadership academies rooted in sovereignty and civilizational literacy.
Imagine budgets tied to metrics: Hebrew proficiency rates, campus retention, digital reach, identity continuity, and community resilience. That would reflect urgency. Instead, we risk normalizing growth within internal layers as evidence of vitality. But vitality is not measured by headcount – is measured by impact.
The Jewish people face demographic contraction in parts of the Diaspora. Assimilation rates remain high. Young Jews often lack historical literacy or fluency in Hebrew. Campus hostility operates with strategic coordination. Digital disinformation spreads faster than institutional response cycles. Geopolitically, Israel faces Iranian escalation, regional instability, and shifting alliances among global powers.
In this environment, budget discipline is not a matter of managerial preference: It is a civilizational responsibility. Reform does not mean dismantlement. It means realignment. It means consolidating overlapping departments. It means capping administrative overhead at transparent thresholds. It means linking compensation to measurable outcomes. It means subjecting institutional budgets to rigorous scrutiny. It means ensuring that activity budgets grow faster than staffing budgets – not the reverse.
Most of all, it means rediscovering urgency.
A sovereign movement cannot drift into administrative comfort; a civilizational project cannot measure success by internal equilibrium. A people that rebuilt itself after exile cannot afford to fund maintenance while adversaries fund delegitimization. Zionism was built by leaders who understood that history does not reward comfort. It rewards disciplined alignment between resources and survival. If Zionism becomes a system designed primarily to sustain its own structures, it will not fail for lack of money.
It will fail because it forgot what the money was for.
The writer is founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund (TIIF) and creator of Wine on the Vine. He is the author of the forthcoming book Never Again Is Not Enough: The Hebraization Manifesto.