The Day After

From the Gilboa hills which I look upon every day the stillness seems to belie everything. I see the weariness of a society where war has ceased to be an event and has become a daily condition. In the British summer of nineteen forty five two months after the collapse of Nazi Germany Winston Churchill with an eighty three percent approval rating was removed from power by the very hands that until yesterday had cheered him. The British electorate operated on a distinction that Churchill himself failed to make that the temperament required to win a war is rarely the same as that needed to rebuild a devastated nation and voted for Clement Attlee a man of such unassuming presence that Churchill used to say that when Attlee entered an empty room the room stayed empty.

The ghost of the nineteen thirties with the unemployment and hunger of the Great Depression still etched into the body politic haunted the ballot boxes and the soldiers returning from the front wanted to know if the country they had fought for would be better than the one they had left behind. The Beveridge Report published in nineteen forty two while the war still raged had mapped the five giant evils of British society want disease ignorance squalor and idleness. Attlee transformed this diagnosis into a concrete promise and won with a majority of one hundred and forty five seats. In nineteen forty eight the National Health Service was founded and what had seemed impossible became the foundation upon which the country rebuilt itself. The British chose Attlee not because they did not love Churchill but because they loved their country more than the man who had saved it.

My hope is that history repeats itself here. We were dragged into this war by the most catastrophic security failure we have ever recorded and the years accumulate without visible result beyond the deepening of our isolation on the global stage. This did not happen by chance. It is the result of twenty years of a power project that made the country instability a condition for political survival that passed legislation to undermine the judiciary and left thousands of Israeli families without their loved ones. The soldiers returning from the Gaza and Lebanon fronts return to a country fractured by rifts that no military victory will heal. We have been in this situation since October seventh and there is no calm horizon in sight.

Nearly seven out of ten Israelis oppose the military exemption for ultra Orthodox youth yet the government that should act postpones the decision because the coalition keeping it upright depends on those very parties to survive. While the children of other families were studying in state funded yeshivot that they refuse to defend we cannot forget this at the polls. Housing is unaffordable for the majority of the country youth and the public health system crumbles while billions of shekels subsidize communities that are illegal in the eyes of the world and international law which grow at a pace that will render any public accounts unsustainable within two decades. The Supreme Court which hundreds of thousands of us took to the streets to defend in twenty twenty three remains under pressure from a government that has never accepted the limits it represents. These are the evils that the day after must cure and none of them disappear with the last missile launched from Iran Lebanon or Gaza.

Israelis will go to the polls at some point by October of this year to vote for the twenty sixth Knesset. I hope that day is what the British of nineteen forty five imagined theirs to be the day when the sacrifice made would be repaid with a country where housing is possible once more where the judiciary functions without political interference and where the burden of security ceases to fall upon the same shoulders as always. It was not a utopia then and it is not one now. It is the minimum a democracy owes to the people who defend it and the courage this election demands of us is not the courage to go to war but the courage to know what we want to find when it ends.

My hope is that my fellow citizens find this path because the British who voted for Attlee were not voting against Churchill they were voting for a country that did not yet exist and which they had the responsibility to imagine. When we are called to the polls the question will not be what this government did yesterday but what we want the day after to be and whether we have the courage to choose those who will lead us there.