Who do we want to be?

On October 6, 2023, we were a very divided nation and it was getting worse after 10 months of massive protests, the largest continuous protest movement in the history of our small nation. The divisions between us were very well orchestrated over years of planned efforts by the person I have referred to for years as “The Divider in Chief”, Binyamin Netanyahu.

For the very first time, the fears of destruction of our limited democracy were so finely felt that we had senior military officers and pilots stating that they would no longer serve in the reserves, which they were legally allowed to do. All of our security chiefs were warning Netanyahu that the judicial overthrow and the demonstrations that were tearing our nation apart were weakening our security but the Prime Minister refused to hear or acknowledge the problem. He ignored direct requests for meetings with the Chief of General Staff Halevy on 3 separate occasions because Netanyahu didn’t want to talk about it. He was more than content with the direction his Minister of Justice was pushing through with his anti-democratic agenda to make the courts subservient to the government.

Our system of government, which alludes to having 3 separate and equal branches of government actually only has 2. The Knesset, in fact doesn’t have its independence because it is ruled by the coalition, the government which makes all of the decisions, so the Knesset and Executive (the government) are one and the same in terms of branches of government. That leaves the judiciary which has served as a gatekeeper to the law and democracy (at least for Jewish citizens of the State, less so for Arabs and almost not at all for Palestinians). Levin’s takeover plans of the judiciary fit Netanyahu’s needs to a tee because, if successful, Netanyahu is convinced that his criminal trials would be cancelled and he will get away with whatever crimes he is accused of and being tried for.

Many of us in Israel have known for years that when Netanyahu has a choice of what is good for him or for the State, his choice will always be what is good for him first. This has been proven on a daily basis since October 7.

It is a known fact, based on intelligence gathered in Gaza that Yihya Sinwar chose the date of October 7 for a number of reasons. First being the holiday knowing that our defenses are lowered on holidays despite the lessons supposedly learned by the Yom Kippur War and secondly due to the weakened state of our security and defenses as stated by our security heads because of the judicial overthrow and its ramifications. We were a dangerously divided nation and the ‘Divider in Chief’ was purposefully and painstakingly continuing on his path of dividing us because it served his personal and political agenda.

At the beginning of the war, when the nation truly came together and everyone was doing whatever they could, I heard a news commentator say the following (and I paraphrase): ‘I hope that by the end of the war, we will continue to come together and continue to argue and disagree but without the violence, venom and verbal abuse that we had before.’ No one, of course knew that the war would go on so long and what would happen along the war.

That hope made a mark in my psyche. I saw the unity of most Israelis no matter their political or religious leanings reach out to everyone to help in whatever way they can. We had just had the earth blown out from under our feet, the army had failed miserably, the government was nowhere to be found, 1200 people massacred, 251 abducted from their homes and from a festival. In just a few hours, everything that we had known and understood was gone. But within a short time, the people came together and put in place mechanisms, organizations and systems to do what our government was incapable of doing and what the people did was good, it was right, it was the glue that bound us all together as one. It could have been sustained, it could have reshaped the map of Israeli society, but it was not to be.

The one person who should have been a leader, a guiding hand, chose a very different path, the continued path of self-survival and division. We found out that on October 8, Netanyahu congregated with his group of political advisors and PR people to understand and analyze, not what the massacre meant to the State and the people but what it meant to his political position and his legacy. And immediately, his well oiled ‘Poison Machine’ went into overdrive. Besides the fact that it took many months for Netanyahu to even put the hostages as one of the main goals of the war, his poison machine began to make the hostages a political issue and not a national imperative. He saw the writing on the wall and knew that he was responsible for them being taken hostage and did all that was necessary to change that narrative. How could we have reached such an absurd position that anyone supporting the hostages and the hostage families was against the government, the war effort, Netanyahu and was an enemy? This was not a natural move. It was directed and implemented by the Netanyahu “Poison Machine”, which worked overtime to deflect the responsibility and corrupt the narrative. The entire nation should have felt that every single hostage was a member of their own family and want everything done to bring them home, but this did not suit the personal and political interests of the person who should have made it his priority. He turned the hostage issue into a left vs. right issue which is a total corruption of all morale ethics and values of the State.

As Eli Sharabi said, “it’s not right and not left! It’s straight!”

Instead of looking at who we are currently or who we were on October 6, we must ask ourselves every day, “Who do we want to be? What kind of society are we building? What values sustain us?”

Hersh Goldberg Polin, throughout his captivity thought of and helped his fellow hostages with a value he breathed which he learned from Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” From those who were with Hersh and survived, talked of how that helped sustain them in their fight for survival.

And there are so many lessons in this book that can help us as a society and as human beings who strive to be humane. Frankl wrote of his time in the camps, “Some behaved like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one he actualizes depends on decisions, not on conditions.”

Frankl shows us very clearly that it is not the circumstances that make us who we are but rather the decisions we make when placed in those circumstances. Our leadership has failed in every way in their decisions about the horrendous circumstances we found ourselves in on October 7 and since. And the one person who has the power to bring home all of our 59 hostages right now continuously chooses the decision of swine and not of saints as his personal interests outweigh the lives of our hostages.

To Netanyahu, I paraphrase Bob Dylan “The decisions you made will never buy back your soul.”

We live each day with a leader and a leadership that is not worthy of the people and it is upon us all to ask ourselves daily “Who do we want to be? What kind of society are we building? What values sustain us?” And then act on making it so.

“I’ve never met them,
But I miss them.
I’ve never met them,
but I think of them every second.
I’ve never met them,
but they are my family.
BRING THEM HOME NOW!!!”