Mimesis

Winston Smith sits down in a corner of his living room, out of sight of the telescreen, opens a diary he bought on the sly, dedicates it to the future, to a time when thought is free, and writes with a trembling hand that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four, and that, if that is granted, all else follows, a small gesture that could cost him his life. George Orwell imagined this man in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to the end of the story Winston fights less against torture than against the demand that he look at four fingers and see five because everyone around him already does, that he give up the last thing power has not yet taken from him, his own mind. The book calls that surrender orthodoxy, which means not thinking, not needing to think, and whoever gets there begins to see a traitor in any neighbor who still checks the sum in his head.

That future is us, and the book leaves every reader a question that is now yours, which is when you last checked, on your own, a sum that everyone around you considered settled. If the answer took a while, the fault is not entirely yours, because for us the mimesis began in school, where a version of that book was already being written when, in 2003, Ariel Sharon’s government set up the Dovrat Commission with the backing of a finance minister named Benjamin Netanyahu, and the commission warned that Israeli children’s lag in reading, math, and science put the country at risk. Since then the subjects that teach doubt have been shoved into a corner with textbooks unchanged for nearly sixty years, a neglect that has outlasted governments of both camps, so that in 2022 even the coalition that had ousted Netanyahu swapped the final exams in history, literature, civics, and Bible for papers graded in-house. A student who leaves school without history cannot question the past he is handed, one who leaves without literature has not spent a single afternoon inside another life, and class after class we have raised citizens with heads as narrow as a corridor, wide enough for a single thought.

On election day in March 2015, Netanyahu warned on Facebook that right-wing rule was in danger because Arab voters, people who live on our street, were heading to the polls in droves, bused in by left-wing groups, and six days later, reelected and contrite, he told a group of Arab Israelis that he considered himself prime minister of all citizens, irrespective of religion, race, or sex, the very sum the Declaration of Independence had gotten right in 1948. In 2019 the actress Rotem Sela asked on Instagram when someone in government would say that Israel is the state of all its citizens and that Arabs, Druze, LGBT people, and, horror of horrors, leftists are human beings too, and Netanyahu answered with what he called an important correction, that, under the law he had pushed through the year before, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and of it alone, and this time he regretted nothing. If you read that and moved on, you swallowed one more objection, as nearly all of us did, one vote after another, until all that remained was the single file of us against them.

In December 2022, with the finance minister of 2003 at its head, we reaped the most fascist, racist, and theocratic government we have ever had, one that handed a ministry to a man convicted of incitement to racism and of supporting a terrorist organization, let rabbis bargain over the soul of the state, and appointed as ministers men who talk of annexing the land and expelling the people who live on it. Half the country took to Kaplan Street for thirty-nine Saturdays in a row to check the sum in public, and if you stayed home, I have a theory about what separates the two halves, though both came out of the same schools, which is that one went looking on its own for the tool the classroom had denied it, while the other accepted a ready-made sum with someone to hate thrown in. The fortieth Saturday was October 7th, and the massacre pushed down the corridor those who were still hesitating at the door, with a fear felt in the flesh and inflated by the man who had learned in 2015 to turn a neighbor into a threat.

Meir Baruchin taught history and civics in Petah Tikva for thirty-five years until, weeks after October 7th, the municipality fired him over Facebook posts in which, by his own account, he was trying to portray Palestinians as people. His children were in uniform when the police held him for four days in solitary confinement on suspicion of intent to betray the country, and when the Tel Aviv Regional Labor Court sent him back to class, a student greeted him with an obscenity. After that, orthodoxy moved at the pace of legislation, with a law in November 2024 that lets the Education Ministry fire any teacher it deems sympathetic to terrorism, a cabinet decision three weeks later to cut off all state contact with Haaretz, the country’s oldest newspaper, a unanimous vote in August 2025 to dismiss the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, who had blocked government moves she considered illegal, and an order that December to shut down Army Radio for harming the unity of the armed forces. This July, days before the election recess, the Knesset enshrined Torah study as a fundamental value in a Basic Law, an honor history and literature have never received, and the next day it suspended arrests of young Haredim who evade the draft, over the objection of the chief of staff. The state that locked up a history teacher whose children wore the uniform now excuses from that uniform anyone who studies Torah full time, and it asks you to look at all this and see five fingers where there are four, because everyone around you already does, and so our version of that book has reached the chapter in which only your surrender is missing.

Even so, the High Court froze the attorney general’s dismissal within the hour and the closing of Army Radio after it, Israelis abroad are posting photos of their tickets home, since the law gives them no absentee ballot, and professors have scheduled conferences in dozens of fields for the days before the election. On October 27th you will have your corner, a partition at the end of the corridor that no telescreen can see behind, and your diary, a slip of paper bearing a party’s letters, and there, alone, with no one around you to watch what you see, you can say with your own hand that two plus two make four, the same small gesture, except that here it costs no one his life. I will do the same behind my own partition, and if you do it too, our version parts ways with the book before its last page, the one on which the man in the book learns to love the power that broke him, and the mimesis stays unfinished.