20 Years Later, Israel Returns to Orange and Blue

For Jews around the world, the color orange will never again be just a color. It will always be shaded by tragedy, injustice, barbarism, and national failure. It will be the symbol of what Israel fights for — children ripped from their beds, dragged to Gaza by a terror group that has made not just martyrdom but murder into the highest virtue, strangled by brutal hands for one reason and one reason alone — to score a psychological victory — and then paraded in a way that defies imagination.

Israel responded less with rage than redemption: mourning, tears, appeals for forgiveness. In the throngs of people lining the procession route for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, we saw the orange displayed on t-shirts and posters, mixed in with the blue of the Israeli flag. Those two contrasting colors were, for a brief but also infinite moment, intertwined. They weren’t one, but they were close.

Twenty years ago, we saw those two colors side by side for the first time. In 2004, Ariel Sharon announced the Gaza Disengagement plan, known in Hebrew as ha’hitnakut, and the country divided into sides: those, mostly on the left and generally secular, who fervently supported the plan (in spite of its right-wing progenitor); and those, mostly on the right, generally religious, who bitterly opposed it. The sides were divided into colors — the supporters of disengagement were blue, those opposed were orange.

It’s hard to impart the extent to which these colors dominated life in Israel at that moment. There were ribbons of each color everywhere you looked, almost as ubiquitously as the posters of hostages and Israelis killed by Hamas today. There were t-shirts and fliers, graffiti and pins in either blue or orange. Blue and orange were bywords, codes, for deep and complex patterns of belief. They indicated how each camp conceived of the past and the future. They were encompassing.

But the orange-and-blue divide wasn’t just about two colors, or even two opposing political camps. It was about internal division. Hitnatkut was a manifestation of deep fissures in Israeli society, like roots of a tree growing across a widening gulf. Over that time, the gulf widened. And by 2023, with judicial reform, the sea of Bibi protests, the Haredi ferocious conscription debate, the gulf was so wide the tree almost plunged into it. Almost, but didn’t.

On October 7, Hamas had a massive strategic advantage: it knew its enemy better than the enemy knew itself. Hamas understood that Israel had been lulled into complacency, that the country had become fascinated by its own story, by its seemingly ceaseless success. Here was a country that could drink water from the sea. That built one of the world’s most vibrant technology industries from scrap. That excelled in science and agriculture. And — it thought — that had brought its worst enemies to heel.

Hamas knew this was a lie Israel had sold itself. Israel had, in fact, become distracted. Its strength was also a weakness. Hamas leveraged that weakness. But the terror group made the same fatal error Israel had made: it didn’t know itself. It didn’t recognize that its barbarity was so great that the carnage would effectively change Israel overnight. The ongoing spectacle of cruelty and unbridled hatred transformed the country into something it hadn’t been for decades. It once again understood that its fight always has been, and still remains, one of existence.

But it did something else. The searing heat of this war has melded orange and blue into each other. Not tightly. Not closely. Not in a way that solves or even improves Israel’s many, many domestic challenges. But somewhat. It took not just the murder of 1,200 Israelis, the mass rapes, the kidnappings, the torture, and the depraved spectacles. But — God forgive us — it took the slaying of an infant and a toddler, along with their mother, to bring us back to a state in which unity may one day be possible.

Hamas will fall. Another enemy will rise. But in the aftermath of the Bibas tragedy, Israel must ask itself whether there are two peoples, two branches to this tree, or one.