Who Owns the Nation?

Israel’s political crisis is sustained by groups and institutions that claim to carry the country on behalf of everyone else. The problem begins when service becomes sovereignty, representation becomes ownership, and every indispensable contribution demands immunity from the judgment of those expected to live with its consequences.

An Israeli reservist returns home after another prolonged period of military service and asks why men of his age remain in yeshivot financed by the same state that repeatedly removes him from his work and family. A Haredi politician replies that Torah study protects the Jewish people no less decisively than tanks or infantry. A settler insists that his family inhabits dangerous ground so that hesitant Israelis in Tel Aviv will not surrender the country by exhaustion, while a judge is described by liberal demonstrators as one of the last adults still capable of protecting democracy from its elected government.

Each of these claims contains something recognizable. That is precisely what makes the resulting structure so difficult to confront. None of these figures merely performs a particular function within Israel; each is gradually invited to appear as a substitute for the nation itself.

Every complex society depends on representation. Soldiers defend people who are not soldiers, judges interpret laws for citizens who will never read a judicial opinion, scholars preserve traditions for those unable to devote their lives to study, and elected representatives make decisions for millions who possess neither the time nor the appetite to attend every parliamentary committee.

Representation remains politically tolerable only while a limited function recognizes its limits. A soldier may serve the public without exhausting the meaning of citizenship, a scholar may preserve a tradition without becoming the exclusive guardian of collective existence, and a court may restrain power without claiming to embody democracy in its entirety.

Israel has been crossing from representation into substitution. Institutions and communities increasingly describe their particular activity as something performed in place of the whole, often on behalf of citizens presented as unwilling, unqualified or insufficiently Jewish to perform the task themselves. A contribution is thereby transformed into a jurisdiction, and the person who carries a burden acquires the authority to determine what burdens count.

The dispute over Haredi military exemptions offers the clearest example. Haredi leaders do not defend Torah study only as a religious vocation deserving protection in a Jewish state; they present it as a national service performed for every Jew, including those who reject the premise. The yeshiva student studies for the metaphysical survival of the people, and his exemption is redescribed not as withdrawal from a shared obligation but as a superior contribution invisible to secular accounting.

The reservist occupies the apparently opposite position, yet the political structure is remarkably similar. He no longer appears merely as a citizen performing an onerous duty but as the fullest form of the citizen, whose exposure to injury and death grants a seriousness unavailable to people who remained at home. Military service becomes more than an obligation; it becomes a certificate of reality, permitting those who bear arms to suspect that others inhabit the nation on credit.

The settler makes an equivalent claim through geography. His residence is not presented as a private decision or even as participation in a disputed territorial policy, but as an undertaking performed for Israelis who lack his courage, faith or historical patience. By occupying the ridge, maintaining the outpost or expanding the settlement, he supposedly preserves land and destiny for a public too comfortable to preserve either for itself.

Liberal institutions reproduce the mechanism while treating themselves as its remedy. The court is no longer asked only to interpret law or restrain executive power; it is expected to perform democracy for a population suspected of having become incapable of democratic self-restraint. Former generals, senior jurists, technology executives and university professors are similarly presented as custodians of a rational Israel that must be protected from the political judgment of actual Israelis.

The right claims to carry the nation’s will, while the liberal center increasingly claims to carry its reason. Neither side appears particularly disturbed by the possibility that the nation itself has been reduced to the passive object of those claiming to embody its authentic voice.

This is not simply hypocrisy, although Israeli politics has never required an emergency airlift of that particular commodity. It is a durable method of escaping reciprocity. Once a group claims that its function preserves the entire country, criticism of its privileges can be presented as an attack on national survival itself.

The yeshiva budget is no longer merely a public expenditure because Torah allegedly protects the nation. Military conduct becomes difficult to examine because soldiers bear the cost of survival, settlement policy is insulated because settlers supposedly hold the land for everyone, and judicial power acquires an aura beyond institutional scrutiny because the court is described as the final barrier against democratic collapse.

Bereavement creates an even more delicate form of substitution. Families of fallen soldiers and hostages possess experiences that cannot be translated into ordinary political currency, yet public life repeatedly presses them into service as national witnesses, moral authorities and interpreters of strategic necessity. Their loss is immeasurable, but precisely for that reason it can be recruited to silence questions that remain political even when they are painful.

A bereaved parent should not be required to become the oracle of the country that failed to protect a child. Israel nevertheless converts grief into public authority and then pretends that doing so is an act of reverence rather than another way of using the bereaved.

The result is a political field overcrowded with rival embodiments of collective existence. The rabbi, reservist, settler, judge, hostage family, security official and elected minister may all speak in the name of Israel, while referring to radically different objects when they pronounce the word “Israel.” Public disagreement therefore ceases to concern policy alone and becomes a contest among groups claiming privileged custody of the nation’s meaning.

This is why disputes that appear negotiable repeatedly become absolute. A fiscal disagreement can be resolved by redistributing funds, and a coalition crisis can be managed by redistributing ministries. A conflict between people who believe they preserve Torah for all Israel and people who believe they risk death for all Israel has already escaped the language of proportion before negotiations begin.

The familiar argument over equality of burden therefore reaches only the surface. Israel is not merely unable to agree on how service, taxation, danger, education and public support should be distributed. It is unable to agree on who may define what counts as service, whose danger creates authority, which education preserves the people, and what form of withdrawal may be renamed contribution.

Each organized sector tries to establish not only the value of what it does but also the scale on which everyone else will be judged. Haredi parties turn exemption into metaphysical defense, military culture turns risk into superior citizenship, settlement movements turn expansion into national guardianship, and liberal institutions turn procedural stewardship into democracy itself.

Politics under these conditions becomes competition among moral monopolies. Victory belongs less to those who contribute most than to those who persuade the public that their contribution is the condition under which all other forms of Israeli life remain possible.

The right has understood this structure with particular efficiency. It transforms fear, territory, religious continuity and military sacrifice into technologies of representation: the settler acts for the hesitant nation, the soldier for the protected civilian, the religious party for Jewish history, and the government for a majority whose electoral choice is treated as an authorization without remainder.

Once this substitution has been accepted, restraint can be portrayed as sabotage by people who allegedly do not bear the actual weight of Jewish history. Institutions limiting power appear parasitic, because power has already identified itself with the survival of the collective.

The center is weaker not because it refuses substitution, but because its substitutes are less compelling. It offers expertise in place of persuasion, institutional memory in place of political creation, administrative competence in place of a conception of common life, and repeated invocations of normality in place of an account of why the former normality generated the present crisis.

Israeli universities participate in this failure whenever they offer increasingly refined descriptions of polarization without examining their own claim to preserve rationality on behalf of the society they describe. The scholar who diagnoses everyone else’s mythology while remaining unaware of the political mythology of expertise has not escaped the system; he has merely secured a quieter substitute.

The diaspora adds a further theatre of delegated responsibility. American Jewish organizations defend Israel, criticize it, explain it, finance it, lobby for it and periodically rescue Judaism from what Israel has become. Their involvement is often sincere and consequential, yet sincerity does not remove the asymmetry between speaking about sovereignty and inhabiting its coercions.

One organization explains Israel to America, another explains American democracy to Israel, one protects the state from international hostility, while another protects Jewish ethics from the state. Each performs a mission on behalf of the Jewish people, according to literature generally produced by the institution performing it.

Diaspora Jews can claim authority over Israeli destiny while remaining outside military service, Israeli taxation, territorial danger and the daily violence of state administration. Israelis can welcome diaspora money and political protection as proof of collective solidarity, then dismiss diaspora criticism as the indulgence of people who do not live with the consequences.

Both parties ask to represent a common fate without accepting a common field of consequence. The relationship survives partly because each side provides the other with something it cannot produce alone: Israel supplies embodied Jewish power, while the diaspora supplies external legitimation and moral translation.

None of this means that every Israeli must perform the same service or inhabit the same form of life. A functioning society requires differentiation, and a Jewish society cannot be made common by flattening the differences between military duty, religious study, judicial authority, cultural transmission and civilian work.

The decisive question is whether each function can recognize its incompleteness. Soldiers must know that sacrifice does not confer unlimited political wisdom, scholars that study cannot transfer another citizen’s danger into sacred bookkeeping, judges that law cannot replace democratic culture, and voters that an election does not dissolve every restraint on elected power.

Settlers must accept that physical exposure does not grant ownership of national history, while liberal elites must accept that professional competence does not entitle them to govern a public they have failed to persuade. Bereaved families deserve protection from the country’s appetite to turn pain into policy, not elevation into a public priesthood from which disagreement appears sacrilegious.

A political function remains healthy when it can say what it performs and what it cannot perform for others. Substitution begins when contribution becomes a title to speak for everyone, and it becomes domination when that title is used to prevent everyone else from judging its costs.

Israel does not lack institutions, communities and individuals willing to act on behalf of the nation. It suffers from their abundance, because almost every organized fragment now presents itself as the force without which the country would cease to exist.

The question is therefore no longer which group truly represents Israel. Every answer to that question merely prepares the next monopoly.

The question is whether any major Israeli institution is still capable of serving the country without trying to own it, and whether a nation repeatedly performed by rival substitutes can recover the capacity to act before nothing remains behind the representation except an audience, an invoice and another emergency.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig