Few people were in the mood to celebrate Independence Day last year.
It was the country’s 75th birthday, a diamond anniversary, but there was little joy and not much celebratory fanfare. Instead, protests rocked the streets, and there was a concern – articulated in numerous columns, essays, and media interviews – that the country had lost its way; that half the country (those in favor of judicial reform) wanted it to be Jewish, and the other half (those fervently opposed) wanted it to be democratic. As if the choice were binary.
The anger and vitriolic rhetoric – the country’s division into warring pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps – led to a sense that the country was hurtling toward civil strife, even civil war. Some warned of an end to Israel’s democracy, others to the unbridled tyranny of the courts.
It was a time of tremendous self-absorption, with the country obsessively focusing on itself – on what it wanted to be when it grew up, on how to deal with festering domestic issues. It was a time when the Reasonableness Bill seemed like the most important thing in the world.
That all seems so quaint now. O, for the days when the judicial override clause dominated the news cycle!There is abundant talk this year of the breakdown of basic assumptions – generally security assumptions and doctrines – known collectively as conceptziot. One mistaken conceptzia was that the country could rely on a small, smart, sophisticated hi-tech army. Another was that the enemy was deterred.
There is another conceptzia that was blown to smithereens in the brutal October 7 attack: that the Jewish state had made it; that its existence was secure; that the country had reached a pinnacle; that it was a regional power – and in some aspects a world power – technologically, diplomatically, and militarily.
Because of that flawed assumption, the country allowed itself to be torn apart by internal divisions. When you feel that your existence is precarious, you make ideological compromises because you realize there are more pressing threats, more significant dangers on the outside, and more important issues than your ideological purity.
But when you feel very secure and confident, then you can refuse to compromise; then you can feel you have the luxury to sow disunity because you believe that you are strong enough to withstand its poisonous fruits. ISRAEL’S PREOCCUPATION with internal matters over the last half-decade – unending trials, unending elections, endless debates over which tribe’s vision of the country would prevail – flowed from an assumption, tragically erroneous, that it could afford to do so because the external threats were kept at bay and were no longer an existential issue.
Then, on October 7, just 164 days into Israel’s 76th year, that assumption exploded.
All of a sudden it became clear that the country had not reached the safe shores, that its very existence could not be taken for granted, and that its position as part of the world’s family of nations was not secure. No, not at all.That was a shattering, startling realization. We thought we had made it – economically, militarily, diplomatically – only to wake up one morning to realize that we were not there yet and that the bitter fight for survival must continue.
October 7 was not the Holocaust, though the atrocities committed were reminiscent of some of the atrocities committed during that nightmarish period. October 7 was a bloody letter from the past, reminding us of that past, and urging us not to be complacent – because the past is by no means dead and buried (witness the current surge in antisemitism), and numerous actors out there want to resuscitate, relive, and repeat that past.
The will to fight
That was one realization and a painful one.
But it came with another realization as well: that the country retains its will to fight, that its people – as argumentative with one another as they are, as different from one another as they may be – still very much believe that their collective cause is just, right, noble, and very much worth fighting and even dying for.
So they fought. They fought in Be’eri and Kfar Aza; in Beit Hanoun, Khan Yunis and now Rafah; in southern Lebanon and Damascus; in the Red Sea and even in Tehran. They fought in tunnels and hospitals, in urban centers and refugee camps. They fought with tanks, drones, fighter jets, and the world’s most highly developed missile defense system. And many died.
LAST WEEK, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, there was a public debate about whether what happened on October 7 could be compared to the Holocaust. In rejecting the comparison, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan said in an Army Radio interview that during the Holocaust, all the Jews could do was beg others to bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz.
Now, he said, we can bomb those tracks ourselves.
That is a cavernous difference, and one that illustrates the remarkable distance the Jewish people have traveled since the Holocaust, with the State of Israel as the vehicle that has allowed us to make that breathtaking journey. There are still those who want to drive the Jews to Auschwitz – that has not changed. What has changed is the Jews’ capacity to prevent that from happening.
If the enemy assumed that high salaries, material well-being, internal political divisions, different visions of what the state should be, and religious-state conflicts had sapped the Israelis of the will to fight for the state and for each other – even for the other they disagree with intensely – then this 76th year proved that assumption wrong. Israel, it turns out, is not the only actor that has been working on flawed assumptions.
Israel’s 76th year showed that while the country is not as mighty and invincible as many thought it was, its people are a lot stronger, more committed, and devoted to the Zionist cause than many believed they were. This year, we were surprised by both the country’s systemic failures and the people’s collective resilience.
In a year of unfathomable pain but also remarkable heroism, we have learned much about the country as it reaches its 76th birthday. Israel is not as secure as many thought, but the people are much stronger and more dedicated than most imagined.
Now, we must build from that.