Welcome to the final installment in our five-part series on the Jewish people’s ancient relationship to the Land of Israel. If you haven’t listened to episodes 1-4, come on, that’s like tuning in to Act 5 of Romeo and Juliet. I mean, you do you, but seriously – this makes the most sense if you listen from the beginning.
We last left off at the tail end of 1973, as Israelis confronted the enormity of the failures that led to the Yom Kippur War. If 1967 prompted national celebration, 1973 kicked off a series of national reckonings about the country’s identity.
Did Israelis want to be socialists or capitalists? Farmers or high-tech moguls? Western or Eastern? And what was more important: being Jewish, or being democratic? For that matter, what did being a Jewish state even mean?
Some of these questions still threaten to tear the state apart. Up til now, we’ve stayed firmly in the realm of history. But by the end of this episode, we’ll have one foot in the present, the other hovering towards the future.
But we have a lot of ground to cover before then.
Beginning with the revolution of 1977.
Chapter 1: Ladies and Gentlemen, Revolution
On May 17th, 1977, the entire country sat glued to the nightly broadcast to hear the results of the latest election. Squinting into the camera, broadcaster Haim Yavin made an announcement that would immediately enter the national lexicon: “Gvirotai v’rabotai, Mahapach.” “Ladies and gentlemen, Revolution.”
An entire country gasped. The party of Ben-Gurion, of Golda Meir, of kibbutzim, labor unions and quote-unquote “New Jews,” which had ruled Israel since before there was an Israel, was no longer in charge. Labor was out. Likud was in.
Ben Gurion didn’t live to see the victory of the man he’d labeled a “Hitlerist” and refused to call by name during Knesset meetings. (Seriously. Love his petty energy.)
Ben Gurion may have been gone, but the Old Guard of Israeli politics was filling his shoes just fine. The former General Secretary of Israel’s labor union declared on television that “If this is the will of the people, we have to replace the people.”
And he didn’t mean “the people” of the kibbutzim and the labor unions. He meant the other people. People in development towns. Who spoke Judeo-Arabic or French or Haketia at home. Who went to synagogue regularly. Who were often kept out for being too… not Ashkenazi.
Israel’s mostly-Mizrahi underclass was tired of being neglected, dismissed, and overlooked. And they weren’t the only ones to mobilize for the first candidate who had made them feel seen.
The kibbutz generation was aging. Zionist idealism was rusting from corruption. Young people were sick of Marxist lectures on collectivism. Then came the Yom Kippur War, which shattered the aura of competence.
When Menachem Begin took the helm, he was an unwelcome anomaly to the ruling elite. He wore a three-piece suit in July. Addressed the Knesset like a courtroom. Invoked Biblical prophets. Unlike the early Zionists, Begin didn’t shy away from the Jewish past. He wasn’t ashamed of piety. He wasn’t embarrassed by the Holocaust, which had claimed his entire family. To him, the Diaspora symbolized continuity – not weakness.
And he was the first Israeli leader to treat Jews from Muslim lands as equals. In an iconic 1981 speech, he tells the story of two Irgun members slated for execution by the British. Rather than give the enemy the satisfaction of a public hanging, the two smuggle a grenade into their jail cell, pull the pin, and lie down on top of it. Together.
1:23 – 1:40: Feinstein was from a European background – what’s it called, Ashkenazi. Moshe Barzani was Sephardic, from Iraq.
2:06 – 2:15: Ashkenazi. Iraqi. JEWS! Brothers! Warriors!
Do you hear Begin’s emotion? The crowd going wild? For the first time, someone in power was acknowledging Israel’s Mizrahim. Recognizing their value, their service, their belonging.
So when Begin called them “achim,” brothers, the Mizrahi public believed him. Especially when he followed through, expanding public housing, raising welfare benefits, and appointing Mizrahi ministers to key posts.
But perhaps more surprising than the appointment of Mizrahi ministers was his approach to the opposition. He could have used his electoral victory to take revenge on the people who had spent decades calling him a fascist. Instead, he gathered his new ministers and top civil servants and declared: “There will be no purges. We are all servants of the state.”
Begin was no stranger to leadership. From 1943 to 1948, he commanded the Irgun, the hardline underground militia that had broken away from the Haganah over, let’s say, differences of opinion on military strategy. Where the Haganah focused on restraint, the Irgun was not afraid to use force. Were the Haganah cautioned against provocations, the Irgun believed in deterrence – AKA pre-emptive attacks, reprisal raids, and an unflinching approach to power.
It was under Begin’s leadership that the Irgun bombed the British HQ at the King David Hotel in 1946. The operation horrified much of the Yishuv – not to mention Jews living abroad, who saw Begin as a reckless extremist. So when Begin won the election, everyone expected more of the same. After all, he had spent decades in the opposition warning against territorial compromises and accusing Labor leaders of weakness and naivete.
But five months into his tenure as Prime Minister, Begin sent the country reeling. The hawk, the extremist, the so-called Fascist and Nazi and terrorist, did something unthinkable. Something that no other Israeli leader had done.
He invited Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem. Yes, the leader of Israel’s most formidable rival, its Enemy Number One! Imagine Bibi inviting Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei over for tea and cookies, and you have a more or less accurate picture of just how insane this was.
Just a couple decades before his visit to Israel, Sadat had written a fawning letter to Hitler – yep, that Hitler – who had been dead for eight years. Quote:
“Dear Hitler: I salute you from the depths of my heart. …you have become an eternal leader of Germany and no one ought to be surprised if you will rise to power again or if the world will see another great Hitler.”
I mean, yikes.
But now it was November of 1977, and Anwar Sadat was standing before the Knesset in Jerusalem. Two years later, the world watched in awe, and some confusion, as the former leader of the Irgun and the architect of the Yom Kippur war signed a peace deal that has not wavered in the decades since.
I want to be clear: it takes two sides to make peace. Begin’s invitation didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a response to Sadat’s public indication that he was ready to talk. Both leaders showed incredible and unexpected courage. But where Begin was celebrated by most of the Israeli public, Sadat’s bravery earned him an execution at the hands of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
In comparison, Israel’s sacrifice was far less extreme. In order to achieve peace, Israel would return the entire Sinai Peninsula – a territory three times larger than the state itself. This meant dismantling army bases, destroying settlements, and uprooting roughly 7,000 Israeli citizens.
As the IDF dismantled the Sinai’s 18 settlements, television cameras caught a moment that summed up the paradox: an Israeli officer weeping, draped in the national flag, as he followed orders to demolish a house.
Was this victory, or surrender? Was withdrawal the ultimate expression of Zionism — or its betrayal?
Begin had a very clear answer. From the Knesset stage, he quoted the Biblical book of Dvarim, or Deuteronomy. I’ll say the Hebrew first:
“הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם אֶת־הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת־הָאָרֶץ, הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ, הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה—וּבָחַרְתָּ בַּחַיִּים.”
“I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life.”
His critics called him a hypocrite. His admirers called him a prophet. But in the Israel, choosing life often comes with a death toll. And the final chapter of Begin’s tenure was spattered with blood.
Israel’s southern border was quiet. Its northern border, however, was a mess. The Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, was doing its best to “liberate Palestine” by launching rockets and cross-border raids into Israel, from their base in southern Lebanon.
Let me make that more concrete. I’m about to tell you a truly awful story, so if you’re not in the mood, please skip the next 20 seconds.
In 1979, a Druze teenager named Samir Kuntar and three comrades from the Palestine Liberation Front left Lebanon in a rubber boat bound for the Israeli coast, intending to kidnap Israelis. Instead of abducting, however, Kuntar killed a young father in front of his four-year-old daughter, then bashed the little girl’s head in.
Kuntar was only sixteen. A child, murdering a child.
This was an unusually brutal raid, but it was hardly an outlier. The PLO and related groups had infiltrated Israel from South Lebanon hundreds of times – to say nothing of the rockets they lobbed or the attacks they carried out outside of the region.
In fact, it was an attack on the Israeli ambassador to England, Shlomo Argov, in June of 1982, that convinced Begin that enough was enough. Less than 72 hours after Argov took a gunshot to the head, Israeli tanks were rolling into Southern Lebanon.
But to many Israelis, the attempted hit on Argov was merely a pretext for the invasion. They pointed out that Argov’s would-be assassins, the Abu Nidal organization, had split from the PLO, which they believed wasn’t extreme enough. No one in Israel liked either group – but many didn’t understand why their country would target the PLO when Abu Nidal had targeted Argov.
Plus, they pointed out, the US had sort of brokered a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO back in the summer of ’81. True, it was unofficial, with ambiguous terms, but the border had been relatively quiet.
But Begin was done with this so-called ceasefire, and with the UN forces on the border, who had done very little to enforce it. You know what they say. If you want something done well, you gotta do it yourself. But this invasion was not done well, and the gamble would ultimately end Begin’s career.
Operation Peace for the Galilee, aka “The Israeli Invasion of Lebanon,” was supposed to be a limited operation to establish a buffer zone. The IDF accomplished this easily…and then kept going.
Israel’s wars had always been short and fast: clear-cut battles for survival. Not this time.
The mission had been accomplished, but Israeli soldiers were still dying in Lebanon. Hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians had been massacred by a Christian militia, while the IDF absorbed the blame. Enraged, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets. In that blur of pain, Begin’s sense of purpose dimmed, and he began to withdraw. By 1983, he stepped down with a tragic parting line: Eineni yachol od. Literally, “I can’t anymore.”
The IDF remained in South Lebanon for the next 18 years.
Chapter Two: Ch-Ch-Changes
Imagine a world in which Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton both served as president, taking turns leading the country each year. Sounds like chaos. Like lunacy. Sounds like Israel in the 80s.
After Begin resigned in 1983, Yitzhak Shamir stepped in temporarily. Like Begin, Shamir had fought in the Irgun during the British Mandate. Unlike Begin, he then split off to join a more extreme group.
Lehi, or Lochamei Herut Yisrael, fighters for the freedom of Israel, is a complicated and fascinating group, and really worth a deep-dive. For now, let’s just say that they were not down with restraint. Their methods could be shocking, including targeted assassinations and questionable alliances.
After the group disbanded, Shamir spent the 50s and early 60s in the Mossad, coordinating secret missions behind enemy lines. And though his party did not win the most seats in the elections of 1984, he formed a unity government with a left-leaning party predicated on a power-sharing agreement. What this means, practically, is that he and Shimon Peres – an old-school Labor Zionist type – agreed to share the job of Prime Minister, two years at a time. While Shamir served as Prime Minister, Peres served as Foreign Minister, and vice versa.
Israeli politics are wild. And so is Israeli society, which spent the 80s and 90s hovering between the two poles of left and right.
Now I’m generalizing here, when I say that broadly speaking, on the right were the Religious Zionists, who had gained prominence after the Six Day War. The Gush Emunim, or Bloc of the Faithful, movement believed that settling the biblical heartland wasn’t a policy choice but a sacred obligation. To many of them, the Sinai evacuation of 1982 was heresy, and they were determined to stop it from repeating in the sacred regions of Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank. (By the way, stay tuned for upcoming episodes about the history of Religious Zionism – incredibly interesting stuff.)
Gush Emunim was led by Chanan Porat, a paratrooper-turned-rabbi who was among the first to re-establish Israeli communities in the West Bank. Porat was convinced that history had tapped him on the shoulder. He once said, quote, “We are writing the next chapter of the Bible.” The Religious Zionist worldview taught that the people of Israel were indivisible from the Land of Israel. Ceding Israeli territory wasn’t diplomacy, but amputation.
On the other end of the spectrum was the burgeoning peace movement. Peace Now, aka Shalom Achshav, was co-founded by Yuli Tamir, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Both Porat and Tamir were staunch Zionists, but their Zionism expressed itself in opposing ways. Where Porat saw divine promise in settling the biblical heartland, Tamir believed that holding on to it was a sign of moral rot. For her, Zionism’s greatest test wasn’t how much land Israel could reclaim, but how much of its democratic soul it could preserve. She insisted that the real patriotism of her generation was not conquering more territory, but choosing a future in which Israelis and Palestinians would no longer live in perpetual war.
The brilliant writer Amos Oz described this new split not as right versus wrong, but as “a tragedy between right and right.” Israelis, he wrote, had become “a people fated to choose between their history and their conscience, their survival and their soul.”
If Gush Emunim and Shalom Achshav represented the ends of the spectrum, most Israelis found themselves somewhere in the middle. The polls of the mid-80s showed that the Israeli public was neither debating a two-state solution nor rolling out the red carpet for the Messiah’s imminent arrival. Peace Now and Gush Emunim weren’t mainstream positions, but rival vanguards, each trying to steer a country that was still standing in the middle of the road.
The two camps were hardly the only example of Israel’s increasing diversity.
By the early 90s, the state founded by socialist pioneers was now crawling with free-market entrepreneurs. The secular sabra elite, meanwhile, found themselves sharing the stage — sometimes unwillingly — with Mizrahi activists, religious Zionists, Russian immigrants, and a younger generation that didn’t remember a world without the state. In Be’er Sheva and Netanya, children of Moroccan and Iraqi immigrants were going to universities and elite army units. In Tel Aviv, the kibbutz was fading. People were buying condos, opening businesses, and discovering the lure of capitalism. Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek even stopped celebrating Stalin’s birthday. (By the way, that’s not a joke. They really did that for decades.)
In short, the unifying myth of “one people, one destiny” was fraying — not out of apathy, but out of abundance. The founding generation had been bound by a shared understanding of sacrifice. But when the fault lines underneath the surface began to widen, what had once been a conversation began to sound like cacophony.
In the face of these existential growing pains, Israel did what any young democracy with barely 5 million people would do.
It absorbed another 1 million immigrants from a vastly different culture. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)
Between 1989 and 1999, Israel’s population grew by over 20%, as nearly a million Jews from the former Soviet Union took advantage of their newfound freedom to emigrate. Doctors, engineers, violinists, chess players, mathematicians, and political dissidents flooded the country, fluent in Russian, Chekhov, and skepticism.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews arrived to the Promised Land at last – many of them forced to bury their loved ones en route. Each wave of immigrants added a new layer to the Israeli mosaic, sparking new arguments about who exactly “the people of Israel” were.
Yossi Klein Halevi summed it all up in a perfect quote: “The wonder of Israel is that it works — barely.”
That chaos was on full display in the 90s, as Israelis debated major pillars of law and daily life on the fly. Putting aside conflict, borders, and security, Israelis argued about the role of religion in public life, whether Hebrew should absorb Arabic slang, even whether hummus could be patented.
This was a tangled, contradictory democracy. Secular liberals relied on the army units filled with religious Zionists. Settlers depended on the taxes of leftist Tel Avivians. Russian engineers built the software that kept everyone’s phones working – even as they found themselves pigeonholed and marginalized. In Russia, they had been zhids. Jews. In the country of the Jews, however, many Israelis insisted that decades of state antisemitism and intermarriage had diluted their Jewish identity beyond recognition.
Meanwhile, 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank remained under Israeli military control, growing tenser by the year. No one had planned for two decades of military occupation. By 1987, the Palestinians’ resentment and frustration erupted into the grassroots uprising we call the First Intifada, as Palestinians used every means at their disposal to “shake off” the Israeli military occupation. Some of those means were peaceful: civil disobedience and strikes. But the unending stones and slingshots and stabbings and firebombs left the country on edge.
The defining image of the First Intifada, beamed into countless living rooms during the nightly broadcast, was a young Palestinian hurling a rock at an Israeli tank. For much of the world, this one image immediately shifted the small, scrappy Jewish state from its erstwhile position as David to a profoundly oppressive Goliath.
Meanwhile, in Israel, each faction read the moment through its own moral lens. Pretty human tendency, to be fair. To Chanan Porat and Gush Emunim, the First Intifada was proof that retreating from the West Bank would only invite greater danger. But to Yuli Tamir and Shalom Achshav, it was a moral reckoning: the unavoidable cost of ruling another people.
Both turned out to be right. By 1993, both Israelis and Palestinians had had enough of the bloodshed. Secretly, representatives from both sides met neutral ground to hammer out an end to the violence.
The Oslo Accords hinged on a simple premise, issued in the wake of the Six Day War. UN Security Council Resolution 242, as well as the 1978 Camp David agreement with Egypt, stipulated that if Israel withdrew from territory it had gained during the Six Day War, then Palestinians could finally renounce violence and rule themselves. Easy peasy.
So on September 13, 1993, two leaders who had spent their lives fighting each other shook hands on the White House lawn, as Bill Clinton beamed in the background. For a brief and shining moment, many Israelis allowed themselves to imagine a world without conflict.
It didn’t last.
Chapter Three: Start Up Nation
The prospect of peace was thrilling, and not just because it meant parents – both Israeli and Palestinian – would no longer have to worry about their children dying. Peace also meant prosperity – a prosperity that Israel desperately needed.
By the mid-1980s, the socialist dream had given way to an economic nightmare. Inflation hit 400 percent. Kibbutzim were drowning in debt. Young people resigned themselves to living in their childhood bedrooms or cramped rentals with three roommates for the rest of their lives.
Something had to give.
In 1985, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir’s unity government launched the Economic Stabilization Plan, a kind of emergency surgery: price freezes, subsidy cuts, wage controls, and a de facto truce between labor and business.
It was painful, but it worked. Inflation dropped from triple digits to single digits in under two years. The ideal of the agrarian pioneer, the New Jew who worked the land, had been replaced by the budding entrepreneur.
Meanwhile, the Histadrut – the labor union that had effectively run the country since before it was a country – was in free-fall. Cooperative grocery stores closed. Hospitals, banks, and shipping companies went private. Even kibbutzim, once built on collective ownership and equal wages, restructured around private salaries, personal bank accounts, and individual home ownership.
Privatization marked Israel’s ideological pivot: from a socialist, Labor Zionist economy built on collectivism and state planning to a market driven system that rewarded individual initiative, competition, and capital. A generation raised on the idea that everyone’s labor was sacred was now discovering that some labor paid better than others.
This wasn’t just about turning a profit. It was also about survival. Maybe you’ve heard the old Jewish joke: Why did the Jews wander in the desert for forty years? Because it took them that long to find the only place in the Middle East with no oil. Eyyyy.
But what the Jewish state lacked in natural resources, it made up for in human capital and innovation. Israel’s military became a training ground for a new kind of Zionist: the coder-soldier. 20 year olds with bulky computers wrote algorithms that would later run the global internet. The military was no longer just defending the country, but incubating its economy. By the early 2000s, foreign VC money was pouring in. Startups with ridiculous names — Check Point, Waze, ICQ, Mobileye — became the new national symbols.
Ingenuity, after all, had always been Zionism’s unofficial religion. The chutzpah once reserved for defying empires was now powering the chase for the next IPO. As Yossi Klein Halevi puts it: “Zionism has always been about transformation — of land, of people, of destiny. Technology is simply the next frontier.”
Many of Israel’s elder statesmen and women were no longer around to see the country’s turn to unabashed capitalism. Maybe they would have seen this new chapter as heresy, an affront to the socialist values that had built the country. Ben Gurion might have been horrified to see that instead of oranges and drip irrigation, Israelis were now exporting flash drives, self-driving technology, cybersecurity solutions, and biomedical products.
But I’d like to think he would have been amazed by his people’s continued creativity and innovation. After all, this was the guy who decided to pursue a nuclear weapon when the country couldn’t even produce radios. Yeah, Israel was no longer socialist. But maybe the real backbone of Zionism was the chutzpah to pursue what seemed impossible.
Still, Israel’s socialist old guard would have been horrified by the ever-widening inequality between the haves and the have-nots. In the early days of the state, everyone was poor. Sure, some were more poor than others – particularly the penniless immigrants who had been banished to the country’s periphery. But Israel’s newfound prosperity wasn’t closing that gap, but expanding it. The glitter of Tel Aviv seemed entirely removed from the sirens and stagnation in the border towns of Sderot or Ofakim.
The philosopher Micah Goodman once warned that Zionism’s biggest danger wasn’t external threat but internal complacency: “When survival becomes guaranteed, purpose becomes negotiable.” But even as they pursued this newfound cosmopolitanism, Israelis were about to learn, yet again, that survival was not guaranteed.
The Second Intifada ripped through Israel like a wildfire that couldn’t be contained. For five years, every parting felt momentous, potentially final. Every outing carried risk. Getting a coffee, taking the bus, going to the movies – all dangled a potential existential price tag. I was in Israel at the time, and I vividly remember my parents forbidding me and my older brother to enter any establishment without an armed guard.
The worst days were the ones with multiple attacks. A suicide bomb on a commuter bus in the morning; a shooting at a checkpoint in the afternoon; another bomb that night.
The army re-entered West Bank towns, hunting terrorists but often encountering civilians. Concrete barriers cut Israelis off from Palestinians – and cut Palestinians off from each other, schools, jobs, and holy sites. Checkpoints multiplied. Engineers hastily paved new Jewish-only roads. Too many people had been murdered by snipers or stone-throwers hiding along the highway leading into the West Bank.
By the time the horror ended, more than four thousand people were dead. Over 1000 Israelis. Roughly 3000 Palestinians. But something else had died, too: the trust required to believe in peace.
And so, in the summer of 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted the 9000ish Jews who lived in Gaza, he didn’t ask for concessions in return. This wasn’t a land-for-peace deal, but a unilateral withdrawal. A signal that Gaza would no longer be Israel’s problem.
The move was incredibly controversial and deeply traumatic. When Hamas took power in 2006, fully seizing control of the Strip in 2007, the naysayers took no pleasure in saying I told you so.
Slowly, Israelis grew used to a horrifying status quo. The periphery towns were bombarded constantly by crude rockets launched from the Gaza Strip. Every year or two, the barrage would grow unendurable, or a rocket would hit the state’s economic center, and Israel would respond with a volley of airstrikes until the other side cried uncle. Lather, rinse, repeat.
By the 2020s, this status quo was almost unremarkable – even to the Israelis living on the Gaza border. Constant rockets, a war every other year – that was just life in the Holy Land, small potatoes compared to the internal divisions that threatened to tear Israel apart.
Chapter Four: The Age of Fragmentation
And the debates weren’t pretty.
Especially once the government passed the 2018 Nation-State Law, which codified Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” For many, this was an uncontroversial and long-overdue affirmation of Zionism’s core truth. But for others — including Arabs, Druze, and other minorities, not to mention liberal Diaspora Jews — it felt like an unnecessary retreat from the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence, which declared, quote:
“The State of Israel will maintain complete equality of social and political rights for all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.”
The emotional temperature rose with each legislative session. This was no mere ideological dispute, but a full-on culture war, and everyone was taking sides. Everything was up for debate.
Why should Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, be exempt from military or national service? Why didn’t Israel have a constitution? How could the Supreme Court claim legitimacy when its justices all represented the increasingly out-of-touch minority of a liberal, secular elite?
Meanwhile, the government kept falling apart. Israelis grew exhausted and cynical from trudging to the polls five times in four years. The country’s political parties were so polarized that it became impossible to build a coalition. And so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time of this recording has led the state for nearly one quarter of its existence (which is insane) did something that would have been absolutely unthinkable just five or ten years before.
He invited the far right into the Knesset. Fringe figures who had once been almost universally dismissed were now in positions of power.
Israel’s new Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, had once defended Israeli developers who refused to sell homes to Arab Israelis, claiming, quote “someone who wants to protect the Jewish People and oppose mixed marriages is not a racist. Someone who wants to let Jews live a Jewish life without non-Jews is not a racist.”
A year later, in 2016, he made international headlines once more for suggesting that Israeli maternity wards should be segregated, tweeting: “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now…. Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.”
Meanwhile, the new National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, now in charge of the Israeli police, had been charged 53 separate times by the very force he now led. Up until 2019, a portrait of Baruch Goldstein hung in his living room. Goldstein is infamous for shooting 29 unarmed Palestinians as they prayed in the mosque adjacent to Ma’arat HaMakhpela, the Cave of the Patriarchs, where our shared Abrahamic ancestors are said to be buried. Not a guy whose portrait I’d want on my wall, personally.
Liberal Israelis and Diaspora Jews despaired, but the fight was only beginning. In January of 2023, the right-wing coalition in Israel’s history introduced sweeping legislation to limit the powers of the Supreme Court.
Supporters of the move argued that this reform was a democratic correction, restoring balance to an unelected and out-of-touch judiciary that had grown too powerful. Opponents saw it as the demolition of the one branch of government capable of checking executive authority.
Scholars like Ruth Gavison and Shlomo Avineri had been warning for years that Israel’s ambiguous separation of powers and lack of a constitution was a ticking time bomb. Others warned that in an increasingly fragmented society, Israelis were living in entirely different realities.
But they still had the appetite for a fight. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Israelis had massed in the streets, carrying signs that read “Save Democracy” and “We Love the Country, We Fear the Government.” The Israeli flag became a symbol not of the government, but of the opposition. This was Zionism in full force, arrayed against a government that claimed to represent Israel’s interests.
Tech executives staged “code strikes.” Air Force reservists formed human chains outside the Knesset, threatening not to show up to reserve duty. Protestors closed roads and snarled traffic. Every week, more and more people showed up.
In response, coalition supporters staged their own rallies, accusing the protesters of elitism and judicial tyranny. Both sides claimed to be saving Zionism from the other.
Micah Goodman, the philosopher I mentioned before, who somehow manages to be everyone’s favorite moderate, captured the divide perfectly, writing, quote: “The Right fears that Israel is losing its Jewish identity. The Left fears that Israel is losing its democratic soul.”
By mid-2023, pundits began to speak of civil war. And across the country, citizens repeated the same exhausted refrain: zeh lo yachol lehamsheekh kach.” This can’t go on.
The fight encompassed more than just judicial reforms. Everything was up for grabs, as old status quos were shaken loose and interrogated – angrily.
Back in 1948, Ben-Gurion had granted a draft exemption to a few hundred ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, hoping to preserve the “remnant of Torah” destroyed in the Holocaust and to secure Haredi support for the Zionist endeavor. He figured it was a small price to pay. It was, in 1948.
But by the 2020s, the interest was punishing. The number of draft-exempt Haredi men had swelled to the tens of thousands. Entire neighborhoods of Bnei Brak and Jerusalem lived off state stipends so they could study Torah full-time. The demographics told their own story: though Haredim made up roughly 13% of Israel’s population, their children made up nearly a quarter of all school-age Israelis — a share projected to double within a generation.
And non-Haredi Israelis, who sacrificed their sons and daughters in combat, whose taxes supported Haredi families, were sick of it. Holding signs that read: “One people, one army,” they remained completely unmoved by the Haredi argument that Torah study was a form of national service — that Israel’s spiritual protection depended on those who studied God’s word.
Politician, intellectual provocateur, and former guest on this podcast Einat Wilf once called the draft exemption “the original sin of Israeli democracy” — not because it was malicious, but because it institutionalized a double standard of duty. “The promise of Zionism,” she wrote, “was shared responsibility for a shared homeland. The exemption turned that promise into a privilege.”
But this wasn’t just about fairness. It was about vision. For the Haredi world, modern Zionism itself remained suspect — a rebellion against divine timing. To embrace the state fully would mean accepting a secular sovereignty that, in their eyes, preempted Divine redemption. And yet, hundreds of thousands of Haredim relied on the tax shekels of passionate Zionists to sustain their lifestyle. It’s the ultimate Zionist paradox: the movement that ended Jewish dependency in exile created new dependencies at home.
The fault lines weren’t always clean, of course. Many Haredim quietly worked, contributing to the economy if not to the army. Many secular Israelis revered God, Torah, synagogue – even if they only visited once a year.
But that wasn’t enough to unify the opposing sides.
The old resentments had burst open, demanding resolution. For a moment, it seemed that Zionism itself was unraveling. That the narrative that had sustained the Jewish people no longer made sense. That the great experiment of the Jewish State had become untenable, impossible, too riven with contradictions and competing visions of the future.
And then the clock struck 6:29 on the morning of October 7th, and the fault lines disappeared.
Chapter Five: Awakening
It was the holiday of Simchat Torah – the festive culmination of the Jewish holiday season. As the sirens wailed and the rockets rained down, as shaky footage made its way through Israeli social media, joy gave way to horror. A country convinced of its own deterrence watched its borders breached with terrifying ease. A state that prided itself on technological and intelligence supremacy discovered that even the sharpest systems can go blind. The most formidable army in the region found itself scrambling to respond to thousands of Gazans on paragliders and motorcycles.
The military response in Gaza — overwhelming, painful, relentless — became not just a campaign but a national reckoning. And when the mass call-up of reservists came, it swept in the whole country at once: religious Zionists and secular Tel Avivians, immigrants from Moscow and sabras from Sderot, people who had marched for judicial reform and people who had marched against the “judicial coup” — all serving in the same tanks, the same convoy, in the same ambulances.
Back home, Haredi draft activists and yeshiva students, tech executives and Arab citizens, the elderly and the very young, crouched together in bomb shelters, each profoundly aware that nothing separated them from the 1,200 people murdered or the 251 taken hostage, in one horrible day.
And then came the civilian response that surprised even hardened cynics. Everyone, everyone, showed up: in uniform, in reserves, in field kitchens, in supply hubs, in funerals. Schoolteachers spent their days picking tomatoes in abandoned fields; engineers stood over industrial pots cooking meals for infantry brigades; teens who had barely learned to drive were shuttling desperately needed supplies up and down the country.
A line of Haredi men snaked around the corner at the local enlistment bureau. Druze women hastily converted their kitchens so they could cook kosher food for soldiers. Bedouin soldiers posted Arabic-language videos to social media, promising Hamas a bloody revenge.
Waves of volunteers poured in from abroad. Young professionals, retirees, rabbinical students, Jews and Christians from Toronto and Melbourne and Johannesburg, arrived to sort donations, pack meals, and write checks from communities that felt the pain from thousands of miles away.
Trumpeldor was long gone by now, but for a moment, his echo reverberated all over the world. “I am a wheel — take me.”
Simultaneously, Diaspora Jews confronted something most had only read about: the daily sting of antisemitism. College students found themselves excluded and harassed. Masked protestors commandeered the subway, demanding that the “Zionists” raise their hands. Swastikas appeared with alarming regularity. And as the death toll rose in both Israel and Gaza, Diaspora Jews found themselves targeted, too. A firebombing in Colorado. An arson in Philadelphia. A murder in LA. A shooting in DC. A massacre at a Chanukah party in Bondi, Australia. Countless acts of vandalism and property damage.
Journalists wrote grim headlines, unimaginable only a year before.
“The holiday from history is over.”
For the first time in two thousand years, the center of gravity of the Jewish people is shifting decisively. Within a decade or two, the majority of the world’s Jews will likely live in Israel. A project born in the diaspora is now entering an age when there may be no significant diaspora at all.
So what does Zionism become now? What happens to an ideology of return once everyone comes home?
Zionism was once a sanctuary, then a destination, then an accomplishment. But the story of Zionism is far from over. Today, Zionism is something harder: a daily discipline of wielding Jewish power without losing Jewish purpose. And as Israel’s demographics shift — with fast-growing Haredi communities, a large and politically active Arab minority, and a secular public pulled between tradition and modernity — how will these identities coexist inside a democracy that wants to be unmistakably Jewish and confidently modern at the same time?
There are more questions than answers. And I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t know.
But what I do know is this.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that October 7th, which I view as the most important day in modern Jewish history, fell on Simchat Torah. Because this holiday celebrates the completion of the Torah, when we read the final chapter of the book we’ve read all year.
It should feel like closure. Like the end. But of course, it isn’t. Because at that very moment — at the height of celebration — something unusual happens.
We don’t close the scroll and walk away satisfied. We open it again, to the very beginning, the first words ever written about our story: Beresheit Bara Adonai et HaShamayim veh et Ha’aretz. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And to me, there is no better metaphor for Zionism, for Judaism in general. The closing words are not closure at all, but an invitation to begin again. To read the same story with new responsibilities, new questions, new eyes. And so we end this season with the ancient ritual that has carried us through every generation:
Back to Bereishit.
Back to the beginning.
“לא עליך המלאכה לגמור, ולא אתה בן חורין ליבטל ממנה”
It is not our job to finish the work, but nor are we free to neglect it.
This is my work: telling and re-telling the Jewish story. Questioning it, where I need to. Loving it, where I can. Struggling with it, because that’s what it means to be a child of Israel.
Genesis 32:29: “וַיֹּ֗אמֶר לֹ֤א יַעֲקֹב֙ יֵאָמֵ֥ר עוֹד֙ שִׁמְךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל כִּֽי־שָׂרִ֧יתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִ֛ים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁ֖ים וַתּוּכָֽל׃
“Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.”
We’ve spent the past five weeks tracing a struggle that began the moment Avraham saddled his camels and headed for Canaan. But God never promised the journey would be easy. Only that it would result in greatness. That it would transform the world.
To be a Jew is to wrestle with history – and to win. There is no logical reason for us to still exist. To have survived Babylon and Rome, exile and expulsion, Crusades and pogroms and Inquisitions, blood libels and genocide. And to have returned, again and again, to the place where we learned to be a nation, to the land that shares our name.
No reason, that is, except for a story. This story, the one we just spent five weeks exploring. A 4,000 year old epic, still going strong.
This may be the final episode of this series, but it isn’t an ending. It’s an invitation: To learn more, to question, to struggle. To find your place, no matter how humble, in the grand arc of history.
Because that’s it, by the way, that’s the secret to Jewish immortality, to the unlikely survival of a stiff-necked, squabbling desert tribe. The telling and retelling of our story throughout the long days and cold nights of exile and despair.
That’s it. And that’s everything.