This country is much more than a home Israel today

The State of Israel is entering its 75th year.

She is rich and prosperous but also conflicted, and stuck at a loss.

It is facing a complex security struggle, which is also intensifying in the domestic arena, and yet it likens itself to a normal Western country.

The security response in itself, in its technical form as a defense of the basis of existence, is perhaps the only thing that Jewish-Israelis can agree on.

But in the long run, the people of Israel can not escape the obligation to clarify their dreams and decide on their vision and path in their homeland.

In the face of the wave of terror that broke out last month, the security forces were activated with increased effort and allowed the people of Israel to celebrate Passover.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett took pride in the fruits of the security efforts, which enabled the people of Israel to dedicate themselves to the fulfillment of the holidays, on flights abroad and on trips around the country.

And yet, it is not only in this that a sovereign state is examined.

The events in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount highlighted the Israeli distress.

The security forces can allow another day of silence, but in the face of the scale of the Arab uprising - in Jerusalem, Umm al-Fahm and Rahat, combined with the Hamas threat from Gaza - the State of Israel seems to be losing not only a basic deterrent but also its symbols of sovereignty.

The growing struggle for which the state is required demands that Jews find out again what they are asking for here?

If they seek national freedom and sovereignty - and not just conditions that allow the holiday to be exhausted - then it is not possible to give up national dignity, especially with regard to what is happening in the capital of Israel.

Dan Maron, a professor of 20th-century Hebrew literature, expressed in his book "Relaxation for the Touch" the Israeli-Zionist distress, in its growing frustration, in the face of the seemingly endless existential struggle.

Thus he wrote: "The expectation of Zionism, that the exclusion of the Jews from European societies and their concentration in their own country would lead to the disappearance of anti-Semitism, did not materialize. For the time being, the historical development of Zionism and its success in achieving Jewish political independence have only led to the replacement of existential dangers of one kind, with existential dangers of another kind "(p. 63).

Modern anti-Semitism

Herzl in his vision sought a solution to the Jewish distress, and believed that only if the Jews were able to gather into a normal state, would they succeed in being accepted as a people among the peoples, as a nation state among the nation states, and the problem of anti-Semitism would come to an end.

But after more than a hundred years, the opposite seems to have happened.

Anti-Semitism has been created, which is largely new and sophisticated, protected by a type of vaccine.

Ostensibly, no more hatred against Jews as Jews, but only criticism of the State of Israel and its conduct.

In doing so, it is again directed against the Jews of the world, until they occasionally come up with complaints against the State of Israel, which they claim in its actions endangers them as well.

The move, which was supposed to be a response to anti-Semitism, is generating a new kind of anti-Semitism.

In this respect, Maron argues, this dimension of the Zionist program has reached a dead end.

In the second dimension, Zionism sought an answer to the very protection of the existence of Jews, who did not stop suffering from riots, pogroms and other troubles.

In this dimension, too, Maron raises the question, which in recent years has caused distress and anxiety among many Israelis, perhaps with all the independence and military power of the State of Israel, what Zionism has achieved is nothing more than replacing one existential problem, like pogroms in Chisinau, with another. , Like terrorism in the city streets in the shadow of a rocket threat and an Iranian nuclear program.

Maron's two of these claims lead the Israeli Zionist inquiry to the fundamental question: not only how to continue to defend Jewish existence in Israel, but especially for what the Jews seek to exist in the Jewish state.

If the purpose of its existence is limited to the pursuit of safe haven, as indeed some seek to present the purpose of Zionism in this way - as a pragmatic and restrained aspiration to no more than a footpath for persecuted Jews and under the auspices of powers, especially the United States - in the last century Zionism has brought The fate of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, however, is a question mark about the future, in the face of growing threats, regarding the question of whether and until when this purpose can continue to be realized.

Not a multinational state

But there is a possibility of a different presentation of the whole purpose of the Zionist enterprise.

Of course, he should give the Jews a secure existence, but as Ben-Gurion reiterated, that is not the purpose.

He reiterated the purpose of Zionism in the words: "The complete and complete redemption of the people of Israel in their land, the gathering of exiles, a national uprising" ("In Campaign" I, p. 190).

Indeed, security for him was no more than a necessary condition, and the main goal is not just the very existence.

Here is the question of origin - what do the Jews really want in the Promised Land: safe haven, or redemption and homeland.

These purposes are not necessarily contradictory, but in essence they are different purposes.

In ignoring the Israeli leadership's posing this question for contemporary clarification, in suppressing the question of essence, Israeli society is sinking into a dead end.

At the tactical level the loss of the road can be controversial as to how to reach the destination.

At the strategic level, a loss of way is expressed in the controversy over the question of what the goal is and where one even wants to go.

In the days leading up to the establishment of the state there was a severe controversy over the question of the way to achieve the goal.

But there was broad agreement on the goal and the sublime purpose.

This was largely the case in the first two decades of the establishment of the state.

Since then, the controversy has shifted to the basic question, to the very question of the purpose for the State of Israel, a Jewish state or another civilized state like other Western countries.

In those years when Israeli society agreed on the question of the destination, Yigal Alon wrote in his book "A Screen of Sand": Obliges it to grant civil equality ... to Arabs in many countries, to only one Jew ”(p. 337).

The people of Israel are in distress because of the fear of losing their way, not because of terrorism.

The renewal of the Zionist story is these days the highest duty of the Israeli leadership.

Leadership is needed here that, in addition to management skills, is committed first and foremost to a Jewish-spiritual stature. 

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