Israeli statehood has suffered many casualties since it was founded. The first was the Altalena in June 1948. At the end of that summer, Ben-Gurion ordered the dismantling of the Palmach and the national underground.
Three years later, in the next round between Ben-Gurion and Begin, the latter besieged the Knesset because of the reparations agreement. At the end of that decade, the residents of Wadi Salib went to mass protests due to discrimination and discrimination. A similar uprising broke out about ten years later in Jerusalem.
Shortly after voting - Demonstrators block Kaplan Junction // Shai Kuriansky
The next victims were those who fell in the Yom Kippur War, whose comrades who returned from the battlefield felt betrayed by the state. In the 80s, to distinguish between the dead and the living, the kibbutzniks, who in their view established the state, saw it as having stuck a knife in their backs.
In 1996, Shimon Peres and his supporters thought their country had been stolen. Nine years later, the same state has turned on the ten thousand settlers in northern Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and on their millions of supporters throughout the country. At least that was their bitter feeling.
The sky fell
This year, in the summer of 2022/23, this is the legal-media-activist camp, one of the strongest that has arisen in Israel, that feels that the sky has fallen and the end has come.
Horsemen block the way of the protesters in front of the Knesset, today,
With emotions do not argue. No argument will win with them. I say this because I myself have been there. In those days exactly eighteen years ago. Like today, I remember the feelings of grief and shock that shook my body as the buses left with the Neve Dekalim deportees. I did not believe that the country I love so much would be capable of such an inhuman act, uprooting thousands from their source of life and their life's work, into an unknown future.
When the evacuation ended, a week after Tisha B'Av, I rationally understood that life would go on. Emotionally, it seemed to me that what had happened would never be again, and that from this disaster we would not recover. Although I didn't stop saying the prayer for the peace of the state, as quite a few of my friends did, I really didn't want to comply with the reserve order I received a few months later. Moreover, the head of the Israel Defense Forces at the time, Elazar Stern, added insult to injury and removed the residents of Judea and Samaria, of which I am one, from our original units to the Chief of Staff.
No one wants civil war
But I continued to serve in the reserves, and the state continued to exist. And like all the previous groups that felt the blow of the Democratic Kingdom, and recovered, so it will be this time. No one wants, God forbid, civil war. No one is happy to vape.
Precisely because the lessons of the destruction of the Temple, because of unfounded hatred, in these days 1963 years ago are rooted in all parts of the nation, there will be no third destruction. And the end of democracy has not come and will not come. Nor will "hollow democracy" come.
The hundreds of thousands whose hearts are filled with despair, rage and anxiety today, and who throughout the protest period were determined but non-violent, will overcome the wound. I don't agree with them, but it's clear to me that they won't bring down the house and its occupants.
And as time passes, alongside the disappointment and bitterness over the loss, they will be happy that Israeli statehood, democratic of course, was saved. Because it is precisely in these days of mourning that we all know that we have no other country.
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