In the spring of 1996, after the Labor Party leader Shimon Peres lost the Israeli Prime Ministership, by a fraction of a per cent, to a youthful Benjamin Netanyahu, of the Likud, he summed things up for the journalist Daniel Ben-Simon. “We lost,” Peres said. “Who is ‘we’?” Ben-Simon asked. “We, the Israelis.” “And who won?” Ben-Simon pressed. “Call them ‘the Jews,’ ” Peres said. He had no doubt been thinking through the distinction—anyway, he didn’t simply pluck it out of thin air. Netanyahu’s American political consultant, the late Arthur Finkelstein, had discretely made much of it during the campaign; the polling analyst and researcher Dahlia Scheindlin, who, years later, worked briefly with Finkelstein, recalled that “he placed great weight on the poll question, ‘Do you consider yourself more Jewish or more Israeli?’ ” He seemed to think, she said, that the distinction “explained everything in Israeli politics.”

It certainly explains much about the upcoming Israeli election, on April 9th, which seems to be a statistical toss-up between two blocs: call them the Jews, led—or incited—by Netanyahu, and the Israelis, led by Benny Gantz, the former Army chief who is the candidate of the Blue and White Party, which he recently formed with Yair Lapid, a former finance minister and the founder of the centrist Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) Party. The election poses for Israelis as stark and as consequential a decision about democratic norms as the 2020 election does for Americans. Finkelstein’s distinction matters in the United States, too, since American Jews seem fated to play an outsized role in next year’s election—especially in the Democratic primaries, where debate about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s influence over U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine—prompted, but hardly fabricated, by tweets and pronouncements from the freshman Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar—seems likely to remain a matter of contention. Indeed, the issue of Israelis vs. Jews poses a special conundrum for the delegates at the annual AIPAC policy conference, beginning this weekend, in Washington, D.C. The distinction may seem crucial, but delegates generally tend to ignore it, assuming that being “pro-Israel” amounts to accepting the virtues of a “Jewish state.”

In recent years, the conference has drawn nearly twenty thousand mostly Jewish delegates—community leaders, professionals, and rabbis, as well as four thousand students—with dozens of seminars and speakers who promote AIPAC’s lobbying to secure American financial and moral support for the Israeli government. Netanyahu and Gantz are both scheduled to address the conference, as are various Trump Administration officials, including Vice-President Mike Pence, as well as the Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. If past is prologue, the delegates will applaud both sides from both countries—proving, as the AIPAC Web site puts it, “bipartisan” support for a “sister” democracy—but the tensions at this year’s conference are unprecedented. Netanyahu has crossed what, for most American Jews, more than seventy-five per cent of whom voted Democratic in 2018, should be lines of principle, and often in ways that mirror Donald Trump. The Democratic 2020 candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris have announced that they will not attend.

Netanyahu has brazenly allied himself with Trump’s Administration and his family (including the cryptic peace negotiator, Jared Kushner, whose family he has known for years), as well as with the Republican Party and Republican funders, such as Sheldon Adelson, all of whom seem willing to follow his lead in formalizing the status quo. Trump has invited Netanyahu—not Gantz—to the White House. Breaking with decades of U.S. foreign policy, on Thursday, in an apparent effort to boost Netanyahu’s campaign—and after a trip to Israel by Senator Lindsey Graham—Trump called for recognizing Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights, an area which was captured from Syria, in 1967. Like Trump, Netanyahu, who is facing possible criminal indictments, has tried to discredit law-enforcement and judicial institutions. He has also made common cause with domestic parties espousing nationalist sentiment so extreme that the Israeli Supreme Court banned one of their leaders from running. Netanyahu’s own bigoted, populist ideology is admired by, among others, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who recently visited Israel and regards him as an ally and, even, a model. Netanyahu is daring not just Democrats but democrats to defy him.

Which also means punching down. Netanyahu has turned his campaign into a referendum on whether a coalition can legitimately govern the Jewish state if its majority in the Knesset relies on the backing of Israeli-Arab parties. Ahmad Tibi heads a liberal, mainly Arab party that is likely to win at least seven Knesset seats (out of a total of a hundred and twenty) in the election. Netanyahu is claiming that Gantz, who may well win a plurality of seats, will not be able to assemble the sixty-one-seat majority required to gain the Presidential mandate to form a coalition without Tibi’s tacit support, and that of other Arab parties. At rallies, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname, Likud Party stalwarts chant “Bibi or Tibi.”

Netanyahu has another reason to fear the Arab vote: a party needs to win at least three and a quarter per cent of the total number of votes cast—the all-important “threshold”—in order to enter the Knesset. Netanyahu’s projected bloc depends on the support of a number of small rightist parties that are hovering just above it. In the 2015 general election, turnout among Arabs was sixty-three and a half per cent, compared with seventy-six per cent among Jews. This time, if Arabs vote at the same rate as Jews, the total number of votes cast would increase to the extent that the number needed to pass the threshold would rise by some five thousand to ten thousand. So, as the veteran broadcaster Eliezer Yaari told me, “Some of Netanyahu’s puny but critical partners, now skirting the line—Moshe Kahlon and Avigdor Lieberman—may not make it in.”

The Trumpishness is just the tip, however. The iceberg, which AIPAC delegates may finally find it impossible to steer clear of, is that, for a decade, Netanyahu has been foisting on American Jews a version of Jewish solidarity, and of statehood, rooted in Likud dogma, that is far from the version that Israel’s founders conceived, or that many secular Israelis want to live in. The menace, Netanyahu has implied, is not just the Arabs but what might be termed Israeliness—a legal and cultural identity available to any citizen who participates in Hebrew-speaking civil society, including the twenty per cent who are Arab.

Israeliness has own contradictions. Just thirty per cent of Israeli Jews say that religion is very important to them—only thirteen per cent of non-Orthodox say the same—yet sixty-one per cent say that “God gave Israel to the Jewish people.” Even so, despite the efforts of Netanyahu’s education ministers to produce observant, nationalist acolytes, secular Israeliness is growing; a walk down Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, where young professionals employed at startups mingle, reveals its dynamism. Broadly defined, Israeli identity is increasingly plausible for, among others, young, middle-class Arabs, who accounted for more than sixteen per cent of students in bachelor’s-degree programs in 2017.