Replacing the Zionist ethos with powerlessness
The Zionist ethos was simple: As Jews, we would no longer allow destiny to control us. Instead, we would take our destiny into our own hands. We would not passively wait for our exile from the land of Israel to end, we would actively make it end by establishing a Jewish state in the land of Israel.
Yet recently, this Zionist ethos has been replaced by resigned pessimism. The current prevailing voice in Israeli discourse is: Our enemies -the Palestinians, and more broadly, the non-Jewish world -hate us, and will always hate us, no matter what we do. They will always try to fight us. There is nothing we can do to bring peace.
In this narrative, Israel bears no responsibility for its actions. Its policies have no impact on the actions taken by Palestinians or on foreign government’s policies towards Israel, which will remain violent and negative no matter what. This means that our actions don’t have consequences. They don’t affect the reality – leading to the question of why we bother trying at all.
This attitude is a type of passivity. Instead of being Zionists and trying to change our reality to create a better future for the Jewish people, we resign ourselves to the reality at hand.
The passivity breeds feelings of powerlessness, which can be terrifying. This is where the war comes in. The war feeds the psychological need to have power. It makes us feel that we are doing something. We are taking action. We are giving it to our enemies.
Because the war fulfills this need and our feelings of agency are dependent on it, we cannot afford, psychologically speaking, to pursue any agreement that would actually end the war.
Without war, we would feel powerless again. So we justify the ongoing war, with no long-term plan or end in sight, resigning ourselves to a reality where war is the routine, as a way of being, without a concrete aim or timeline. We do this by saying: “There is no point in pursuing an agreement or a policy solution. Our enemies will hate us anyway. They will always try to destroy us. The world will condemn us and boycott us no matter what we do.”
This series of justifications of the war makes us feel even more powerless, which makes us in turn more psychologically dependent on the war’s continuing, and the cycle carries on.
But this is not the Zionist way. As Zionists, we must challenge ourselves to get out of this psychological pattern, so we can pursue true power: The dream and determination to take legends of a better future and turn them into reality.