My Israel no longer exists.

A long time ago, at the end of the last century, I remember a photograph of Theodor Herzl hanging on the staircase of the Colégio Israelita Brasileiro in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which always left an impression on me. It was a picture of him standing on the balcony of a hotel in Basel in 1897, his dark beard, his eyes fixed on a horizon that isn’t in the photo but exists within him, with the posture of someone who believes he is seeing something others haven’t seen yet. He was a secular man, shaped in the cafés of Vienna, who knew practically nothing about Judaism when he began writing about a Jewish State. What he wanted was a nation. What he envisioned was a place where Jews could, finally, be a part of the world while remaining Jews.

I don’t know Basel. But I knew antisemitism in Brazil. Not expressed hatred, but the strangeness of when there was Christmas everywhere except in my house, or in the acid joke about stingy Jews, or in the very Portuguese language that I love so much, which created its own verbs and nouns where antisemitism emerges almost poetically, like judiar, judiaria, judiação. In English, they lose their antisemitic magic, but believe this old Jew when he says they paved the way for my desire to live in a place where I would just be Me.

On the beaches of Israel, where I sometimes walk in the late afternoon, Israel feels, for a few minutes, exactly as it should be. People of all backgrounds, secular or religious, children running on the sand, the Hebrew language mixed with Arabic, Russian, and over a dozen other languages. It is no exaggeration. In its most recent editions, Ethnologue—a reference organization that acts as a global encyclopedic inventory of living languages—formally catalogs between 34 and 37 living languages in current use within the territory of Israel. In those moments, the country I chose still exists. The problem is that it only survives in these interstices between what it is and what was promised.

I came here by choice, having learned early on that countries can be loved and hated at the same time. When I arrived in Israel, one of the first things I did was get an organ donation card. It was a deliberate, political gesture, a way of saying that I had wagered on this place with the most essential thing I had, my body. I do not regret the gesture.

Zionism was born secular. This is not my progressive opinion; it is a matter of history. The rabbis of the time, for the most part, opposed Herzl. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem at the time, Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, leader of the Orthodox movement, expressed this opposition categorically. In a June 1898 letter sent to his mentor, he wrote about “the evil men and scoundrels who have joined this sect”, going so far as to state that “hell has entered the Land of Israel with Herzl”. The Haredim of today are, in this sense, the heirs of a long tradition of rejection of the state’s founding project, which they politically dominate today. There is an irony in this that Kafka would have delighted in.

The movement that was born to integrate Jews into the world became the vehicle through which right-wing extremists and the Haredim, who refuse to serve in the Israeli army because they do not recognize the State, but accept our money, came to power.

In 2025, the Haredim represent 14.3% of the Israeli population. In 1948, they were perhaps forty thousand people in a newly formed country. The birth rate of this group is high enough that the Israel Demographic Institute projects a Haredi majority in the education system before the middle of the century. Today they number over one million, four hundred thousand. Sixty percent are under twenty years old. Meanwhile, 82,800 Israelis left the country in 2023, a 44% increase compared to the previous year. In 2025, for the first time in the history of the State, Israel registered more emigrants than long-term immigrants. The yordim, those who descend, are mostly secular, educated, and economically productive. Those who stay, increasingly, study Torah with state subsidies and do not pay income tax. It is demography, not democracy, that is redrawing the future of the country.

Political scientist Dani Filc, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and an expert on the country’s ideological evolution, described Likud as a party gradually assimilated by extremist forces, one that adopted their most radical theses not because Netanyahu defended them, but because they were the price of survival. Corruption is not always financial. Sometimes it is simply moral.

Before October 7, there were weekly demonstrations of tens of thousands of people against the judicial reform. Tel Aviv would come to a standstill. For a moment, that was a civil society refusing to yield. After the attack, this movement was partially suspended by the war, and the war was used to deepen exactly what the movement was trying to prevent. Ideas that were previously presented as radical—permanently occupying Gaza, expelling populations, annexing the West Bank—became the government’s agenda with the speed that a state of emergency always grants to those who were waiting for it.

I am not speaking of Israel as someone who looks from the outside and judges from afar. I am speaking from the inside, in the north of the country, where rocket alerts are part of our calendar. I am speaking as someone who chose this place, but who needs to be honest about what we are becoming, and it is not good.

The Zionism that brought me here was an idea of collective dignity, not religious supremacy. The promise that a dispersed people could build something common, plural, alive. It was, to some extent, the same idea that any liberal democracy carries: that it is possible to live with differences, not against them.

Herzl wrote, in 1896, that in the future Jewish nation everyone would be able to serve God in their own way. It was a statement of freedom, not of theocracy. It was the statement of someone educated in Voltaire, who knew the cost of living under the tutelage of a single truth. The State he imagined was modern because it needed to be modern. It was a State of Jews, not a Jewish State. The distinction matters. That is exactly what is being unmade, methodically.

I still have my ADI card in my wallet. I haven’t taken it out. But there are days when I look at it and wonder to which Israel I am donating my organs. To the country of the late-afternoon beach, of the mixed languages, of the tech students and the mothers pushing strollers on the boardwalks, or to the country of Ben-Gvir and the rabbis who claim that learning the Torah protects the State more than the soldiers dying on the front lines, while their own children do not serve and we foot the bill?

This question has no easy answer. There is an important difference between having no answer and not asking the question. What worries me is not the uncertainty. It is the silence of those who should be asking this question and are not.

Herzl never saw the country he imagined. He died in 1904, at forty-four years old. The Declaration of Independence would come forty-four years later. He and the founders of this State were part of the secular movement that built this nation, which is now being devoured by forces that always believed a Jewish State could only be a State of one God.

We are here, in this moment, watching what is being done to the original Zionist dream. That is the only obligation a country imposes on someone who chose it: not to look the other way when it is losing itself.