The Statehood We Lost – And What It Reveals About Us

“Statehood.”

A word once cherished in Israel because it captured who we aspired to be. Today, it is spoken almost as a slur. Once, a “state-minded” person was anyone committed to building the country – anyone for whom the state genuinely mattered. Today, a “state-minded” person is the odd outlier who still believes in the possibility of a shared nation rather than in the narrow loyalties of tribe and faction.

But let’s take a step back.

Statehood is not about somber suits at ceremonies or polite gestures for the sake of protocol. Statehood is a political and moral principle: the recognition that a public entity exists whose preservation stands above coalition lines, personal ambition, and fleeting power plays. It is the understanding that the state’s institutions – the courts, the military, the Knesset, the democratic guardrails themselves – are the tools of our shared existence, not political trinkets to be dismantled when convenient.

A state memorial for a prime minister murdered by a terrorist is not a private remembrance ceremony. It is a moment in which the state looks into the mirror and asks: Who are we? What have we become? And where do we go from here?
Such a ceremony holds meaning only when grounded in a shared commitment to the principles that make a democratic society possible.

And when the representatives of the people refuse to attend a memorial of this nature, it is not a lazy absence. It is a profound rupture in their understanding of the state itself. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is the foundation of the resistance to the attempted judicial overhaul, the struggle over the courts, the organized attacks on the IDF and Shin Bet, and the efforts to block a state commission of inquiry.

The erosion of statehood rarely begins with assaults on laws. It begins when leaders place themselves above the institutions, when they hurl accusations, drain public trust, and try to dismantle the gatekeepers who stand between the public and the dangerous concentration of power.

To my eyes, a direct line runs from coalition members boycotting the state memorial for Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination to the broad attack on the rule of law and the attempt to transform Israel into a fascist-leaning autocracy. They avoid a ceremony that confronts them with reality so that they may deny it; so they can avoid looking in the mirror and seeing what their actions are doing to the rest of us; so they can continue dismantling the state, piece by piece.

Statehood demands leaders willing to sacrifice short-term power for long-term moral sovereignty. It demands leaders who view the public not merely as voters or supporters, but as partners in shaping the country’s future. When the opposite happens – when leaders treat the state as personal property – the resulting fracture threatens our very ability to live together.

This story is not just about a ceremony, crucial as it is. It is about the trajectory of Israeli society. Statehood is not a quaint word that fell out of fashion. It is the connective tissue holding the country together. The organized and systematic attack on it endangers all of us: October 7th stands as a stark reminder of what happens when a nation fractures into tribes and sub-tribes.

And if the current government succeeds in its mission, October 7th may prove only the prelude to a deeper national collapse. We have experienced this before – history has documented how nations fall apart when statehood erodes. And without safeguarding what little remains, it can happen again.

The debate over statehood and shared identity is not an online shouting match of stereotypes. It is a test of our collective reality: Will we maintain a system of rules not subject to the will of a single individual? Will we allow polarization, personality cults, and political messianism to corrode the state’s institutions?

Our answer must be unambiguous: the traumas this country has endured belong to all Israelis, not to one political camp. Attempting to appropriate them – or erase them – will lead only to further disintegration.

If Israel is to withstand the challenges ahead, we must return the principle of statehood to the public sphere – in our ceremonies and in our actions. Coalition members as well – those uncomfortable with Rabin’s murder or with October 7th – must attend the memorials, the days of remembrance, even the funerals. These moments belong to them no less than to anyone else.

And it is the only path left to save what remains of this country.