Is This the Country the Jews Dreamed of for Two Thousand Years?

Since October 7, a quiet arithmetic has begun to haunt the Israeli imagination: not the familiar tally of dead and wounded, not the daily count of rockets, sirens, minutes in shelters, but the more discreet sum of departures. The suitcases that appear at odd hours.

People who once spoke of permanence have begun to speak, instead, of options: a second passport, a cousin abroad, a “temporary” stay that stretches into something else. Passports are no longer administrative footnotes; they are held in reserve like amulets against history itself.

Even second-citizenship passports that were once a dormant privilege of diaspora bureaucracy – lying forgotten in drawers, inherited rather than chosen, rarely thought about and almost never spoken of with urgency – have been quietly reclassified as an exit route.

Yet it also reads as a confession: that the promised ending has resumed the old plot, and that this, the third attempt of Jews to gather history into the form of a state, has not escaped the ancient pattern it was meant to conclude.

For what, after all, was the modern Jewish state meant to be, if not an interruption – an escape from the recurring humiliation of being tolerated until one is not? A country, the argument ran, would turn the Jewish condition from a permanent contingency into a stable fact. It would exchange the brittle protection of others for the sovereign guarantee of oneself.

And yet the question now returns with a severity that is almost obscene: is this the country dreamed of across two millennia of exile, prayer, and endurance? Is the fulfillment of longing supposed to feel like an unending rehearsal for catastrophe – life measured by proximity to the next alarm, the next funeral, the next round of vengeance?

There is a kind of metaphysical fatigue that comes when a people’s security becomes a metaphysical debate. One begins to suspect that history is not merely cruel but inventive, that it refuses to grant the simplest mercy: normality. The ancient bargain – survive, and you may at least live – seems repeatedly revised into something harsher: survive, and you may continue surviving.

You can build a home, but it must never become a resting place. You can raise children, but you must teach them the geography of shelters before the geography of parks. You can call it resilience; you can even sanctify it. But there are moments when resilience is only a respectable name for exhaustion.

The pragmatic mind, unromantic and unpersuadable, eventually asks its vulgar, necessary questions. How many years does a person get – sixty, seventy, eighty, perhaps ninety if fortune and medicine conspire? What is the moral beauty of sacrificing the only life one has to a perpetual state of siege? A nation may be an idea, but a human body is not. A homeland may be sacred, but a child’s nerves are not made of scripture.

If the first purpose was safety – safety from persecution, from the arbitrary hatred of being a Jew – then one must dare to ask whether the enterprise has achieved its most basic aim, or whether it has merely traded one form of vulnerability for another, louder one.

And if it is now said, with bitter irony, that Israel is among the most unsafe places for Jews, the statement is not only a political critique; it is an existential scandal. The refuge has become a front line. The sanctuary has acquired the architecture of a fortress. Even the language around it betrays the tension: “deterrence,” “security doctrine,” “iron dome” – as though the very sky must be engineered into a shield. This is not what a normal country sounds like. This is what a garrison sounds like, and garrisons do not sleep.

Then comes the more disquieting thought: that much of Jewish life in certain so-called “Arab countries,” for all the undoubted hardships and humiliations history can supply anywhere, was not uniformly defined by the nightmare that later propaganda required. There were merchants, craftsmen, families with rooted lives, with businesses and rituals and a daily familiarity that did not depend on the romance of perpetual danger.

Many left not from an immediate abyss but from a mixture of fear, persuasion, pressure, and historical momentum – only to arrive and discover another cruelty awaiting them: war on one flank and discrimination on the other, an internal hierarchy that could humiliate even as it claimed to gather everyone under one flag. At least in its earliest years of the Zionist project, they did not merely inherit the conflict; they inherited the insult.

Meanwhile, the conflict itself is not a wound that closes; it is a wound that learns to speak. Arabs and Palestinians will not stop calling for liberation; leaders will not stop weaponizing the cause; and October 7, whatever one’s moral reading of it, has undeniably jolted the Palestinian question back into the world’s bloodstream with renewed fury.

Hatred has re-found its vocabulary. Anti-Semitism has gained new disguises and new excuses, as it always does, feeding on every image and every outrage, collapsing distinctions, punishing the ordinary for the sins – real or alleged – of the state. The Jew, once again, is held responsible for history in a way no other human being is asked to be.

And so the Israeli finds himself in a uniquely corrosive predicament: not merely defending a country, but defending the very legitimacy of having one. Imagine the psychological violence of belonging to a place whose existence is treated as an argument rather than a fact. Most nations may be criticized, even despised, but their mere being is not debated at dinner tables across continents.

When Morocco is mentioned, Spain, Brazil – there may be opinions, jokes, stereotypes, indifference. But Israel is a provocation in itself, a word that draws a reaction before it draws a thought. It is a country that people speak about as though it were a theory, and theories may be refuted.

From this comes the humiliating theatre of concealment: the tactics of the ordinary Israeli abroad who calculates, in a split second, whether to tell the truth about origin. The softened accent. The evasive answer. The “I’m from…” followed by a pause, a substitute, a safer geography.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a place you must sometimes hide to avoid being harassed, threatened, or shamed? What does it do to a psyche to carry, like a stain, the name of one’s own home? Patriotism is difficult enough when it is merely an emotion; it becomes grotesque when it requires disguises. To be from a country one cannot mention in public without consequences is to live in a permanent negotiation with reality.

And then, finally, nihilism arrives – not as a dramatic posture, but as a slow, rational seep. The mind begins to ask whether the entire project has been built inside an unsolvable equation: a home meant to end the Jewish exception, that instead enshrines it in geopolitics; a nation meant to normalize the Jew, that instead makes him the emblem of global argument; a place meant to protect, that instead concentrates danger.

You cannot emigrate from this sensation as easily as you can emigrate from a passport. Even if you leave, the idea follows you, because the idea is what people argue with. The state was supposed to be the end of being a question. Yet the Jew remains interrogated – only now the interrogation includes borders, flags, armies, and headlines.

Perhaps this is the bleakest insight: that a people can succeed in building a country and still fail to win the one thing every weary human being secretly wants – an unremarkable life. Not heroism. Not destiny. Not symbolic victory. Just the quiet right to exist without explanation, without fear, without the daily need to justify the air one breathes.

If a homeland cannot grant that, then what, in the end, has it granted? A harder form of pride, certainly. A louder form of identity. A more elaborate form of struggle. But safety? Peace? The ordinary dignity of being able to say, without flinching, “I am from there,” and have the world simply move on?

The tragedy is not only that the dream has frayed. It is that the dream, once meant to free Jews from the curse of perpetual history, now seems to have recruited them back into it – this time with uniforms, elections, and airports, but still with the same old shadow at the edge of the room, reminding them that even in their own house, the night may not be theirs.