What the Sukkah Knows That the Safe Room Doesn’t

This Sukkot, two shelters stand side by side in countless Israeli homes. One has reinforced concrete walls, a steel door, and a window designed to seal from within. The other has flimsy walls and a roof of branches through which you are supposed to see the stars. The first is the mamad, Israel’s safe room. The second is the sukkah.

One is built on the assumption that survival depends on keeping danger out. The other barely keeps out the rain. Since the Simchat Torah of 2023, the distance between them feels like more than architecture.

There is a striking image in the Jewish evening prayer: “Spread over us the sukkah of Your peace.” Not a wall of peace, not a fortress, but a sukkah, the most fragile structure imaginable. The prayer is not naïve. In the very same blessing it asks God to “remove from us every enemy.” But a fortress can be built alone and locked from within. A sukkah of peace cannot. Defense rests on walls; peace rests on a relationship with those outside them.

Israel has become very good at building protection out of concrete. Since the Gulf War, nearly every new apartment has included a mamad, and many of us know its walls far too well. In an emergency, its logic is indispensable. But concrete is built for the next siren. It cannot imagine a different future.

What does it take to imagine a future with those outside the walls, even those who were once the enemy?

Martin Buber faced that question in its hardest form. During Sukkot of 1953, he took the stage at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, the city where he had taught until the Nazis came to power, to receive the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. His speech was titled “Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace.”

It was only eight years after the Holocaust, and many in Israel were outraged. Buber had not come to forgive. He refused to see “the Germans” as a single mass. He distinguished between those who murdered, those who knew and did nothing, and those who resisted and paid with their lives. He named mistrust as the great obstacle to dialogue between peoples, and still said he believed, despite everything, that they could enter into it.

This was not generosity toward the Germans. In I and Thou, published thirty years earlier, Buber described two ways of relating to the world: to the other as an “It,” something to experience and use, and to the other as a “Thou,” a presence who can answer. In those terms, war turns the other into an It: a threat to defend against, a target. Sometimes there is no choice.

But for Buber the self does not exist before its relations; “through the Thou a man becomes I.” Whoever meets the other only as a threat diminishes not only the other, but themselves. In Frankfurt, refusing to see the Germans as one mass was also a refusal to let the murderers decide who he would become.

Frankfurt came after Germany’s defeat, but for Buber, dialogue was never a privilege of the victor. As one of the leaders of Ihud, he called for Jewish-Arab agreement precisely during years of violence and fear on both sides, not in times of calm. The principle was simple: dialogue cannot wait for calm, because calm may never come without it.

In the Israel of 2026, there may be no Palestinian partner for a particular agreement. That is an assessment, and it can be tested. But “there is no one to talk to,” a phrase long familiar in Israeli discourse, is something else. It compresses millions of people into a single mass, exactly what Buber refused to do: those who murdered and those who opposed Hamas, those who rejoiced and those who simply want to raise their children. It is not an assessment but a decision.

Many Israelis will answer that Oslo was the test, that it failed, and that talking now carries a risk Israel cannot afford. That is a serious argument about conditions, and conditions change. “There is no one to talk to” is an argument that no change could ever answer. And if talking must wait until there is trust, we may be waiting for the very thing that talking could help create.

The Palestinian question and the place of Arab citizens in Israeli politics are not the same issue. But they reveal a similar political reflex: deciding in advance which relationships are beyond consideration. Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, tested that reflex. Five years ago he addressed the Jewish public directly and joined the coalition that made the Bennett–Lapid government possible. Today Bennett and Lapid, now running together, have ruled Ra’am out, and Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff who hopes to replace Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared that Abbas will not be part of his government. Even an experiment that actually happened is now treated as one not to be repeated.

The elections are now only weeks away. The word “peace,” around which entire campaigns were once fought, has all but vanished from this one, and not only on the right. Eisenkot said in a television interview that anyone who talks about “peace now and two states for two peoples” does not understand the depth of the conflict, adding that other solutions could be pursued in the Palestinian arena. The caution is understandable: after October 7, “peace” may be the least profitable word in an Israeli campaign.

Whoever leads the next government, from whichever camp, will need to offer not only a safe room, but a sukkah of peace. Israelis deserve to hear whom their leaders are willing to speak with, under what conditions, and toward what end.

When the holiday ends, the sukkahs will come down. The safe rooms will remain. They should. The question is whether the word “peace” will remain locked inside them too, and what we become if it does.