What For

The campaign that ended on October 27th was the sixth since 2019 and the most bitter any of us can remember. Twelve days later, President Isaac Herzog handed Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form a government, on the recommendation of sixty-seven members of the Knesset against forty-six, and Benjamin Netanyahu, still in office, warned that a government resting on Arab votes would amount to national suicide. The country then went back to what it knows how to do, which is to take sides for a man or against him.

Let me say at once where I stand. I want Eisenkot to form his government and I want Netanyahu out of power. I also maintain that his departure, by itself, will leave the main thing where it is, because the main thing is not him. Israel’s problem is not our enemies. They exist, we know each of them by name, and none of them is going away. The problem is the absence of a national project, of a shared answer to what we are and what we want to be, and a country without that answer argues about people, having nothing else left to argue about.

We had a project once. On August 12, 1953, the Knesset passed, by thirty-nine votes to thirty-six, the law that took the schools away from the parties, among them the schools of the Labor stream, which belonged to the Prime Minister’s own movement. Ben-Gurion threatened to resign in order to overcome the resistance of Mapai, a party that ran the country for twenty years without distinguishing itself for selflessness and that lost, in that vote, something of its own. The Army was already a single army, and in 1959 the labor exchanges passed from the union to the government. There was an idea of the state in all this. The state existed so that no group could keep what belongs to everyone, and for that reason it collected first from those in charge.

Over the past seventeen years, with an interval of eighteen months, the road has run the other way. Netanyahu has governed Israel longer than any other Prime Minister, he got there by the ballot, and he signed the 2020 accords with Arab countries. None of those achievements said what the country wants to be, and in that vacuum the state stopped being built to serve society and was occupied by a group that serves itself from it. In March of 2023, by sixty-one votes to forty-seven, the coalition amended a Basic Law to make it harder to remove a Prime Minister, and the Attorney General said that the amendment served the personal case of Netanyahu, a defendant since 2020 in a trial that still has no verdict. The government sworn in in December of 2022 had more than thirty ministers and set aside twelve and a half billion shekels in coalition funds for two years, against two billion nine hundred million in the two years before. Once we no longer know what the state is for, using it for one’s own benefit stops looking like a deviation and starts looking like a victory.

A country without a project shrinks the future to the next vote. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, we went without a budget, and few doubt that Netanyahu blocked it so as not to hand the premiership to Benny Gantz, as the agreement between the two of them required. The first budget since 2018 was passed only in November of 2021, by another government. Those who cannot plan a year will not plan a generation.

A country without a project is governed by fear. Whoever has no destination to propose offers an enemy, and enemies require no explanation. Year after year we were told whom to fear, and the list was accurate. In 2023, between March and July, military intelligence sent the Prime Minister four letters warning that our enemies saw an opportunity in the crisis opened by the judicial overhaul, and his office denies that he was alerted. On October 7th, the state that lived by pointing at enemies reached Kibbutz Nir Oz forty minutes after the last terrorist had left. In 1973, the commission of inquiry was appointed forty-six days after the attack, and Golda Meir, spared by the judges, resigned all the same. Three years after the massacre, no commission has been appointed, although ninety-two per cent of Israelis consider an investigation important. Fear ought at least to prepare a country for the day of the attack, and it did not do even that.

A country without a project comes apart into tribes. In 2015, President Reuven Rivlin described Israel as four of them, and the diagnosis has aged well. Each has its own schools, newspapers, and reasons, and each has learned to negotiate its share with whoever happens to be in government. Loyalty to the tribe takes the place of loyalty to the country, and the law of 1953 is repealed little by little, with no vote required.

And a country without a project condemns the opposition to the same emptiness, which includes me. The two blocs in this election were called by his name, the Netanyahu bloc and the anti-Netanyahu bloc, and we accepted the christening. We have spent seven years defining ourselves by removing him, and removing a man is a task, which ends on the day he leaves. On that day we will discover that the fight was not about him. A country without a project finds another person, and half of us will love that person and the other half will detest that person with equal devotion, because fighting for and against someone is what remains to a society that does not know where it wants to go. Eisenkot speaks of a national emergency government. Emergency is, once again, a name dictated by the threat, and a government formed to remove someone is born with the usual question answered and the other one still to be asked.

The other question is concrete, and it has been postponed so many times that it seems abstract. Seventy-eight years after its founding, Israel has no constitution. Fifty-nine years after 1967, it has not decided what to do with the territory it occupies or with the millions of people who live there. It has not decided what the state owes each citizen, wherever he lives and however he prays, or who carries the burden of defending it and of paying for it. Each of these indecisions has its beneficiaries, and that is why it lasts. A national project consists of deciding them, and deciding costs something, because it obliges each side to hand over something of its own so that something can belong to everyone again. That is how the vote went in 1953, thirty-nine to thirty-six, and that is how a project can be recognized.

This is the choice in front of us, and it is not the one we were offered at the polls. We can change occupants and go on asking who, and we will have six more campaigns like this one, with another name on the posters. Or we can demand of the coming government, and before that of the party each of us voted for, that it say what it is willing to give up and what country it means to hand over twenty years from now. I will demand it of mine. For seven years we have been summoned to say who, and the first election worth having will be the one that asks us what for.