Ha’aretz Op-Ed – August 27, 2023
Note: David Grossman is an Israeli Prize winner for literature whose books have been translated into 30 languages.
“Netanyahu’s coup has unleashed a fear in Israel not seen since the Yom Kippur War. Like a tightrope walker who suddenly looks at his shoes, and then at the abyss, we are increasingly aware of the fragility of our existence here, but this time our enemies, our destroyers, have come from within.
From its very beginning, Israel has had the character of a startup. Ever since the first command, “Lekh Lekha,” go forth, there has been a drive of innovation, of going toward, of entrepreneurship and invention and creation. Israel has known hard times and existential risks, but the spirit that surged in it was that of a vibrant country, radiating originality, the unexpected, and the capacity to soar to new heights in every field.
And then came the government coup, and Israel began to lose the free and harmonious movement of a healthy body. Everything that was natural and self-evident to most of its citizens – identification with the state, the near-familial sense of belonging – is now hesitant, riddled with doubt and anxiety. While the process predates the coup, it was the coup that caused it to erupt with so much force and entirely change Israel’s reality.
Now a process of destabilization and disintegration is taking place, a shattering of the social contract and the deterioration of the military and the economy. Not only has the progress been halted, but the regression is intensifying: to reactionary attitudes of discrimination and racism; to the exclusion of women and LGBTQ people and Arabs; to ignorance and boorishness as a positive value.
And as often happens in a sick body, more and more injuries demand immediate treatment. Rising to the surface of Israeli awareness are the significance and the implications – and also the unbearable costs – of the disease of the chronic occupation; of the aberrant relations between the secular majority and the Haredi minority, as well as with the national-religious community, which is more dangerous due to the force of its extremist influence; and of the state’s volatile relations with its large Palestinian minority and its catastrophic state, and so on and so forth.
The 64 Knesset members of the governing coalition and most of their voters will disagree with me, but presumably even they, if their minds are not hermetically sealed, will find it hard to deny that Israel’s sense of strength and of almost unlimited power are vulnerable to doubts and fissures and anxieties.
For the first time in years, Israelis have began to feel what weakness means. For the first time, perhaps since the Yom Kippur War, we encountered within ourselves the thin trickle of existential fear. The fear of those whose fate is not entirely in their own hands. The fear of the weak. And even though “the people of eternity are not afraid,” it is nevertheless startling to admit that the current fear is not just a natural reaction to an external threat, and that our enemies, are destroyers, came from within.
It’s interesting: It is exactly those people who represent, in their own eyes, the strong, confident and powerful Israeliness who today evoke in Israelis a sense of fear, weakness and threat associated with the galut, the Diaspora.
Like a tightrope walker who suddenly looks at his shoes, and then at the abyss, we are becoming increasingly aware of the fragility of our existence here; of the sense that the ground is falling out from beneath our feet. Suddenly, nothing can be taken for granted. Not the camaraderie, not the spirit of sacrifice, not the “people’s army,” not the mutual responsibility, nothing. Before our horrified eyes, the one-of-a-kind state that was created here is being emptied of fundamental components of its character, of its specialness, its uniqueness.
Is there a way back from the place we have reached?
Those who despair in the face of the aggression and rapacity of the right must be reminded over and over: The protest movement is the hope, the free motion within the fixation, the creative act, the mutual responsibility, the ideological courage. It is the lifeblood of democracy. It is our and our children’s chance to live a life of liberty here. It must be maintained and fueled and adhered to, and a long-term commitment must be made to restore Israel, to rebuild it from its break, and also from its heartbreak, to get it back on its feet – until we know whether it survived or whether our catastrophe, its disease, has turned malignant.
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