Jews have always been David to the world’s Goliath: tiny, vulnerable, and armed with little more than faith and a slingshot. But then they built a state, and the story got a lot more complicated.
For a couple of decades, Israel, a tiny country of less than 10 million people, seemed like David facing off against armies of Goliaths. But today, the Jewish state has a formidable army and powerful allies, and it’s traded its metaphorical slingshot for much heavier weapons.
In other words, the Jewish people finally have some power. For much of the world, that power, and Israel’s tense relationship with its neighbors, is enough to recast them as the villains. Zoom out, though, and Israel is still a teeny-tiny minority, with several angry, neighboring enemies.
These days, it’s fashionable to side with the underdog. The triumph of the weak over the mighty just makes for a better story. It also makes us feel good about ourselves. But being a David isn’t all triumph and glory. The original David may have won against Goliath quickly, without any injury to himself. The Jewish people haven’t been as lucky.
Sure, they’ve persevered against the odds, and even thrived. But you don’t spend millennia being batted around by history without racking up a few scars. For Jews, the past is never far from their minds.
A nation of refugees
Even before Israel existed, the Jews who would become Israelis were on guard against the worst-case scenario. After all, Israel is a nation of refugees. Half of the soldiers in the newly minted IDF were Holocaust survivors who had escaped the Nazis only to be plunged headfirst into an existential struggle.
One day after Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared the country into being, five Arab armies invaded, and Israelis faced a stark choice: fight them off or be wiped off the map.
The Jewish state won that first war, but wasn’t out of the woods quite yet. Israel’s neighbors operated under the motto: “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.” They warned over the following years that they would continue to fight Israel.
Israelis had every reason to take them seriously. Collective trauma doesn’t disappear so quickly. It lingers like an unwelcome house guest flashing nightmare reels before your eyes.
There is one silver lining to the Jewish people’s bloody past, though: Vulnerability is an excellent motivator. There is no ferocity quite like the ferocity of the cornered and desperate.
‘We have no place else to go’
Joe Biden, who was a senator back in 1973, visited Israel around the time of the Yom Kippur War, as the Jewish state faced invading armies from Syria and Egypt. He met with the country’s prime minister, Golda Meir, and told her, “You’ve just spent the last hour telling me in effect you have no chance.” She responded, “One thing I didn’t tell you, we Jews have a secret weapon. We have no place else to go.”
That may sound like a pretty lousy secret weapon, but Israelis use it well. It was that desperation and vulnerability that forced them to find creative answers to their most intractable threats. This mindset led to the Iron Dome system, which intercepts and neutralizes missiles and rockets, or the targeted and often unconventional elimination of their enemies, which establishes deterrence, or Israel’s nuclear weapons that remain the worst-kept secret in the Middle East.
Israel has nuclear weapons as a back-pocket contingency plan for the moment that all hell breaks loose. If history has taught us anything, it’s that all hell will always break loose eventually, and the Jewish people have a long memory for that kind of thing.
All of this means that while the Jewish people have come a long way from David and his slingshot, they’ll never see themselves as Goliath, because they remember exactly what it felt like to confront a much bigger and stronger enemy. They remember what it feels like to be crushed again and again.
Israel’s military power grows
With this mentality, the Jewish state has done everything it can to build up its military power to ensure that “never again” isn’t just an empty slogan, but a reminder, a collective responsibility for all citizens to shoulder.
“That act of David’s, of walking forward, as the champion, into the encounter with Goliath, is an astonishing, ridiculous act. It’s an act of sacrifice, and it’s an act of willingness that you see in this generation of Israelis,” said journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. “Hezbollah built out traps in South Lebanon at a colossal strategic scale, and they had trained for a generation to do nothing but ensure that a lot of Israeli soldiers die if the Israeli soldiers ever attempt to take out Hezbollah. And there were very clever solutions to that, right, from the Pager Operation to Air Force strikes that hit exactly the right places and the right people, but the soldiers, the ground forces, the ordinary infantry were still just willing to go walk in to those villages, to those tunnels that had spent 30 years being built out, armed and prepared specifically for that moment.”
“I think that Israelis understand themselves as a David, a David that will consistently win because we face a type of enemy that keeps coming at us in ways that are self-destructive,” Rettig Gur added.
Has Israel swapped roles?
To the outside world, this sacrifice isn’t noble, but a symptom of the way Israelis’ power has corrupted them, particularly when it comes to the fraught relationship with Palestinians. Palestinians don’t have a regular army, but rather a handful of forces with little hope of success on a conventional battlefield. They don’t have a competent government that can protect them. They don’t even have bomb shelters.
That’s not to say that Palestinians can’t threaten Israel. Every rocket, every stabbing, every abduction is a tangible and constant threat, but it’s never going to be an even playing field. Because of that, from the outside, Israel, with its tanks and its smart bombs and even its nuclear weapons, can start to resemble Goliath: A big, bad bully corrupted by power.
When you take a closer look, however, you realize that the story of David and Goliath isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. It’s not merely a tale of the small against the great, the weak against the mighty. This isn’t “Remember the Titans” or even “300”; the lessons run much deeper than that.
Small and great, weak and mighty are a matter of perspective. From the outside, David looked small, and so his triumph seemed like a win for the little guy. But the Hebrew Bible isn’t particularly interested in the distinction between the big guy and the little guy. David didn’t see himself as weak. The shepherd boy from the tribe of Judah was used to fighting off lions and bears to protect his flock.
His weapons were simple, but he had the training and experience necessary to use them well. More importantly, he had the power of his convictions. His heart burned with righteous fury, with faith in God. He didn’t see himself as the underdog at all. He saw himself as a vessel, an instrument of a divine force no human can comprehend. That’s why he wins against Goliath: not because he’s smaller, not because he’s excellent with a slingshot, but because he is right.
At its root, this isn’t really a story about the small against the mighty. It’s a story of two competing moral systems between the Jewish worldview and that of the Philistines.
The Philistines were idolaters whose universe was ruled by multiple competing gods. These gods were remarkably similar to humans, more interested in playing power games than in justice or truth. They had no concept of absolute justice, just losers and winners, weakness and might. Only the strong survive in such a world: not because they’re righteous, but because they’re mighty.
Then the Jewish people came along with their outlandish concept of ethical monotheism and turned this worldview on its head. Because to be a monotheist in a world of idolaters is to say that there is an absolute truth, might doesn’t make right, but the other way around. It’s right that makes might. Righteous people will win the day, no matter their power, no matter their size. That’s why David wins, and Goliath loses, not because of their power or their size, but because of the righteousness of their respective causes.
We no longer live in a world of Bronze Age idolaters, but moral relativism is alive and well. In some circles today, absolute truths are unfashionable; instead, everything is context-dependent. That’s why crowds of American college students cheered on the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah: not because these groups are right about anything, but simply because in a fight against Israel, they have less power.
After all, power corrupts. Since the Jewish state is more powerful than these non-state actors, then Israel must be wrong, and these radical Islamists must be right.
But in the story of David, the Hebrew Bible doesn’t automatically conflate weakness with moral superiority. The underdog doesn’t have moral authority simply because he’s the underdog. David wins because he has God on his side, and he’s fighting for a specific moral system. That’s why David remains a hero, albeit a flawed one, as he grows from being a simple shepherd to a king, from a boy with a slingshot to the commander who conquered Jerusalem.
Most of the time, he wore his power easily, but even the mighty King David made mistakes, wielded his power incorrectly, and hurt others in the process. When he did, the Hebrew Bible called him out on it, unflinchingly, in the same way that modern Israelis confront their own country’s power.
Calling out abuses of power
Dr. Carol Kidron, an anthropologist at the University of Haifa and an expert on memory and genocide, explained that she is “surprised by the fact that Israelis, young Israelis, are still very much uncomfortable with power.”
“I think we very much want to be moral. I think we very much feel uncomfortable with anyone who we turn into a victim. There’s a lot of self-berating language going on, hesitation, concern about our policies, and at the same time understanding that we have to defend ourselves. I think that surprised me because I expected that the younger generation in Israel would be more Goliath at this point,” Kidron said.
Rettig Gur added that “Israelis don’t want power. What Israelis want is to feel safe. Israel’s great purpose in the world is to be a safe place in which ordinary people can live happy lives. Israel doesn’t seek power. Israel seeks safety. Israel seeks ordinariness. When it has safety and ordinariness, it shrinks back down to size and that contrasts with our enemies.”
The state of Israel doesn’t fight for funsies, it fights for survival — it fights for its people’s safety. Israel’s worst enemies are not Palestinians or Lebanese civilians: they’re the Islamist regimes and ideologies that have strangled the Middle East, convincing ordinary people that they will not be free until the Jewish state is destroyed. That ideology is toxic and doomed to fail.
“I don’t agree with every decision of the Israeli government, and I don’t expect the military to always make the right decision in every battle, obviously,” Rettig Gur said. “But because it’s a democracy, I know that at the fundamental level, my kids are taking part in a larger circle
of protecting each other as opposed to dying for the sake of somebody else’s grand, weird ideological vision of whatever they are.”
Israel, like all states, is flawed. It has significant power, and it sometimes misuses that power. It’s not always the moral authority, that’s an unhappy truth that Israelis face every day. However, Israelis strive to maintain moral clarity, regardless of the challenges they face. They try to discipline our soldiers who abuse their power. Unlike Israel’s enemies, they don’t target civilians. They make an effort to evacuate them from the areas where they operate. They even provide lifesaving medical care to their worst enemies, like Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attacks.
Maybe, Israel’s superpower isn’t the Jewish people’s desperation, trauma, or vulnerability. It’s not the fact that Israelis have nowhere else to go. That’s all true, of course, but it’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is this: The source of Israel’s power is its commitment to morality under the most difficult of circumstances, to protecting its citizens.
For centuries, the world told the Jewish people their lives were cheap. For centuries, they had no country and no army to prove the naysayers wrong. But now the Jewish people have an army of Davids, men and women fighting to defend their families and their home, the only one they have, and that is worth fighting for.
