Liel Leibovitz
Tablet, Apr. 19, 2023
“Israelis must now decide if they want a state for Jews, or a Jewish state.”
Having just returned from Israel, the country where I was born and grew up, and of which I am still a proud citizen, I apologize for being the bearer of bad news: There will be no easy, sane, or rational end to the protest movement that erupted in response to the ruling coalition’s proposed judicial reforms. In fact, the content of those reforms has ceased to matter to anyone involved on either side. The government’s promise to temporarily halt the legislation and convene a broad-based committee tasked with finding a compromise under the supervision of President Herzog has barely registered with the protesters, and one major member of the opposition, the Labor Party, has already quit the negotiations. Nor did a string of gruesome terror attacks, coming on the heels of Passover, shift the collective focus away from taking to the streets. What is going on in Israel now has passed from the realm of the political to the metaphysical, which means that compromise is not possible. Instead, day by day, the arguments are getting louder and more cutting, and animosity is everywhere on display.
This is because Israelis realize, consciously or not, that they’re no longer arguing about a series of proposed bills designed to change the balance of power between the executive and the judiciary branches. Nor are they arguing about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. Nor does it matter whether Netanyahu continues to lead his coalition, or steps down, or offers Benny Gantz the job of defense minister. Nor does it have anything to do with Jewish or Muslim demography, or with a future Palestinian state—whether or not such an entity ever exists, or doesn’t exist, in any part of the West Bank or Jordan.
Israelis aren’t arguing about politics anymore. They are fighting about the future, not only of Israel but of Zionism, the miraculous movement that, in the span of one century, freed the Jews from their respective houses of bondage, returned them to their indigenous homeland, taught them the spells of sovereignty, and powered their miniscule nation’s growth from embattled weakling to global powerhouse. And as a result, this is strictly an inter-Jewish affair, one pitting millennia of Jewish particularity against the promise of universalism once embodied in the Catholic Church, then in the Enlightenment, and now in the technocratic politics that unite the civilized right and the progressive left in the club of advanced countries that has, with increasing misgivings, included Israel among their number. … [To read the full article, click here]
