Understanding the Past Protects Israel’s Future

Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s assertion that “what we’ve seen in Israel since October 7^th is a reflection not of an individual prime minister, not of individual members of his cabinet, but genuinely a reflection of 70, 75 percent, 80 percent of Israeli society” is just plain wrong. Prime Minister Netanyahu fired his Defense Minister whose positions on war priorities differed dramatically from his own and who threatened his coalition. Demonstrations across the country accuse the Prime Minister of allowing his coalition considerations to infect critical decisions regarding the war, including those affecting the hostages.

For good reasons, releasing the hostages from more than a year of tortured captivity has naturally focused attention on the future: not only about how to care for the men, women, and children subjected to such prolonged brutality but also how to prevent the so-called ceasefire deal from laying the groundwork for rebuilding Hamas’ power and restoring its lethal dangers. Calculating all the stages of the proposed agreement raises legitimate questions about whether it offers the kind of protection Prime Minister Netanyahu promised–and Israel needs– with this the country’s longest war.

However, warranted, the intensity of the debate on the exchange’s impact for Israel’s security going forward has blocked going back to investigate how October 7’s barbarism dismantled the state’s core theoretical foundation: protecting its citizens. For even if the terror descending on Israel was unimaginable, it can be said to have been imagined by such philosophers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau whose work laid the philosophical groundwork for the purpose of statehood. All three would deem those October attacks marks of failure: because the state did not discharge the primary obligation it owes to the men and women within its borders. The social contract, an archetypical metaphor of political theory, presumes political society to be the creation of individuals who freely consent to accept its authority and laws because they are presumed preconditions to securing lives and freedom. And such presumptions have broad cultural purchase across what are typically rated as rightly guided states.

But the elected government on a day of such unexpected violence seems not to have been traumatized into an awareness of its own responsibility for this cataclysmic rupture of the state’s core duty to protect its citizens. That Israel’s military leaders have acknowledged their own failures to protect the country’s population and its territory does not eliminate the reckoning citizens have a right to demand of those in charge of the state on October 7. A government that denies its responsibility for what happened on October 7 cannot unite its citizens around a strategy for war nor around a plan for peace when the violence is ended.

The hostages remain a touchstone not only for the failures of the state to discharge its duties, but also for questions about why such depravity could not be stopped more quickly. The scale and duration of the carnage call for an unmediated public accounting. Returning the kidnaped to their families and homes in exchange for Palestinians tried and convicted of murder may indeed jeopardize safety, but even those justified fears cannot displace the pressing need for beginning to address the massive breach of Israel’s commitments to its citizens. The very language Israelis have seized for the hostages– — חטופים–echoes experiences of Jewish weakness: when Jewish children were kidnapped by Jews and sent off to the army to meet the quotas imposed by 19^th century Czars. Or the frequent comparisons of the numbers killed to those exterminated during the Holocaust flattens history to eras when Jews lived without the power to defend themselves. How Israelis are talking and writing about October 7 is drenched in a language devoid of the scaffolding a state is expected to afford.

The hostages are also emblematic of questions that deserve answers regarding decades-long policies reducing the numbers of reserves presumably to cover the costs of high-tech anti-missiles batteries and reinforced tank equipment that ended up saving the lives of many soldiers. Notwithstanding a blizzard of contradictory feelings, a hard analysis of how these trade-offs came to be accepted and whether there were other ways to pay for both warriors and weapons cannot be avoided. It is imperative for Israel’s leaders to grapple with all sorts of complex and competing arrangements about military spending and weaponry. How much of the budget should underwrite the costs of the human army? How much should be budgeted for drones and robots? Without total information about the formulas devised in the past, there cannot be an accurate accounting for the future.

Beyond the sheer necessity of knowing how to repair the multiple mistakes enabling October 7’s slaughter, there is a no less significant reason for Israel’s citizens to expect accountability from their political leaders. For the focus on the hostages captures foreboding sentiments about a Jewish state unable to prevent what many of citizens call a ‘pogrom,’ another phenomenon Zionism insisted sovereignty would end. There is as much need to look back at the Zionist reasons for founding a Jewish state as there is for examining the philosophical purposes grounding the legitimacy of the very idea of the state.

Zionism promised to uplift the citizens of a Jewish state; to give them the chance for a new kind of solidarity and moral development; to empower them to shape their own destiny. The essential and original Zionist claim was not that Jewish nation building was unique but rather that Jews possessed a different way of being a nation because Zionism joined its political struggle to noble ambitions that may never be fulfilled but should never be forgotten or discarded. Citizenship in this reading of Zionism embodied a series of obligations, and among them was the imperative to live up to the country’s founding principles. Zionism took the Talmudic principle charging all Jews with responsibility for one another and broadened it to include all citizens of the state. Discharging duty was not simply an ideal, it was an obligation that took precedence over the pursuit of individual happiness.

No less significant was Zionism’s promise to enable the Jews to take advantage of the modern world without losing their distinctiveness. For that reason, the state Zionism established—was not named Judea but rather Israel—reminding people of the Biblical figure who stole the birthright rather than the one who inherited it. Zionism was not so much intended to transmit the birthright inherited identity–the one structured by religious law and ritual–as it was to transform Jewish identity liberating a people from Rabbis as well as from oppression. A country named Israel could make more room for the ‘other’ than one called Judea. Thus did Zionism put power in the hands of citizens, because it is the people who live with its consequences. Thus has Israel’s democratic structure become the instrument for reshaping the country’s culture and society in extraordinary ways.

The Israel of today can claim enormous achievements: a population of under one million in 1948 is now approaching ten million and lives at a standard of living that the country’s founders could never have envisioned nor implemented. The economy has opened up opportunities for education and professional gains to all sectors, including those once the targets of discrimination: Jews from Middle Eastern countries and Arab citizens. That the Israel of today is more socially liberal on almost every issue than the Israel founded in 1948 is clear: more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity. These trends have strengthened attachment to the state as the necessary predicate for the future embraced by the men and women willing to risk their lives to fight for its survival. Israel accords its citizens more respect for their diversity than it did at its founding. Nor is it a society where the elite, no matter its ancestral origins, claims special privileges—not when a former chief of staff, once a member of the War Cabinet, buries his son and nephew in the same week of war.

During this protracted war, there has been no more conventional wisdom than of a seriously fragmented Israeli society. But while at Israel’s founding, there were two communities—Arab and ultra-Orthodox—exempted from fulfilling all the burdens of citizenship, Arabs have become more integrated even as the ultra-orthodox more embalmed in their institutions. In fact, the Ultra-Orthodox served in the army during Israel’s War of Independence with the blessings of their Rabbis. Now their religious leaders are demanding a law granting full-time learning in Yeshivot as qualifying for exemptions from the military draft. By contrast, the more exposure to Israeli culture and society, the more integrated Israeli Arabs have become in the country’s occupational structure particularly in medicine, social work, and education, with increasing numbers serving in the military. Every video of volunteers packing food or clothing or toys for the tens of thousands of people forced out of towns and villages in the north and south after October 7 shows religious Muslims and Jews working together. Every survey counts more Israeli Arabs supporting the war, increasingly identifying firmly as citizens of Israel.

That the notion of obligation embedded in Israel’s discourse on citizenship strengthens the country’s solidarity is undeniable. That the growing commitment to human rights bestows a dynamism and creativity on the state is indisputable. That the two coincide in tension with one another is obvious. That their co-existence generates social strains and political pressures is beyond doubt. That Israelis believe in a future made better than the past because of these two components of Israel’s identity is the reason most still believe that the state, with all its deficits, is the only predicate for progress and for creating a future better than the past.