Many Israelis, as well as countless lovers of Israel overseas, have been living a continuous nightmare these past eight months. They feel the country they’ve known could disappear, and that very thought makes their hearts skip a beat. A world without a democratic Israel is one that none of us wants or can even imagine. A person is the sum of all their experiences, and our experiences in Israel - despite the challenges - are, on the whole, good ones. We love Israel, Israeliness, and our culture and language. So, what, all this will just end? Ever since Abraham, we’ve known how to shape a vision that seemed far-fetched and put it into practice, but we’ve often missed darkening clouds. Is Israel as we know it going to disappear?
That is hard to imagine. And it’s strange because we are a people whose secret sauce for generations and generations has been imagination. Abraham needed imagination to abandon his country, his homeland, his father’s house, and his beliefs. And the exodus from Egypt? A people lacking imagination would not have imagined a world beyond slavery. Such a nation would not have rebelled, wandered in the desert, and survived for forty years.
We are a people whose imagination defines us even in moments of crisis. When Jerusalem was burning, and Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai managed to escape in a coffin, he came to Vespasian with an imaginative request. Give me Yavneh, he requested. He saw the destroyed Temple and understood that one chapter in his people’s history had come to an end. But he managed to set sail in his imagination and shape a Jewish world without the Temple, priestly vigils, and sacrifices. How fortunate that we were handed a new and different Judaism. Instead of a Temple, we received the beit midrash and the synagogue.
We are a people with a highly-developed sense of imagination, one that sometimes even borders on delusion. Take Herzl, for example. A Viennese journalist with a megalomaniac vision and infectious charisma managed to bring 209 Jews to Basel for an ideological seminar, which he fashioned as a congress of an established nation. They were then a minority of a minority. The lion’s share of the Jewish people did not respect the Zionist vision. Many even despised it. But imagination overcame reality. “If you will it, it is no dream” was not some spiritual slogan, but a tangible instruction manual.
But where have we failed to imagine? In the face of disasters. We have never managed to imagine the worst of all. For example, there were some who managed to comprehend the direction of Europe long before the Holocaust – Herzl with the Uganda plan, and Jabotinsky with the idea of evacuation. But most of the Jewish people imagined that the dark clouds on the horizon would soon be overcome by the sun, and so they stayed. The lessons of our history do require the Jewish people to hope for the best, but to a certain extent, they also require us to envision the bad.
Today, a new, different, bad moon is rising, and our home is in danger. It is hard to think about, but is it possible not to wonder about the fate of a country whose police minister is Itamar Ben Gvir? Where Bezalel Smotrich controls the treasury? A country led by a person whose most redeeming characteristic, even in the eyes of many of his supporters, is his ability to finagle under the bright lights?
It is hard to imagine that this could be the end of the Zionist experiment, but it could happen. An increasingly rickety democracy, without a constitution, without two houses of parliament, without strong enough norms of “that just isn’t done,” and that is only restrained by the Supreme Court. Democracies stronger than Israel have collapsed.
But nightmares and heartache aren’t a plan of action. We are fighting back in the streets of Israel, but this battle is also global. Diaspora Jewry also has a role to play. This is not merely an internal Israeli battle, but an unprecedented Zionist struggle. We must remember that Zionism was imagined, born, and lived in the Diaspora. There are seventeen million Jews in the world, only seven of which are here. A small nation like ours doesn’t have the privilege of giving up. It will be a disaster of epic proportions if the great chapter opened here in the 20th century goes down the drain in the 21st.
This is Israel’s second war of independence, and like the first, it requires imagination alongside determination and courage. While no blood will be shed in it, I hope, it is existential in every other sense. And like the first, it is such for Jews everywhere, not just those of us in Israel. We must prevail together. A nation whose national anthem is HaTikva - The Hope - has no other choice.
Dr. Yizhar Hess is the Vice Chairman of the World Zionist Organization