I was in Israel this summer to give a talk about Zionism and the national home idea at a conference about People, Society and State after October 7. My talk focused on place and space and house and utopia at a moment of catastrophe and crisis. I stayed for 3 weeks. In almost constant motion, I went on long daytrips on the road; up north to Majdal Shams in the Golan and then alongside the Lebanon border and down to Akko, another south along the “Gaza Envelope;” another to Beersheva to look at architecture. From a position of great privilege, I went to see the country, saw landscape, art, antiquities, and architecture, went to protests. Except for one trip not in my control, I did not cross into the occupied West Bank, and that was into the desert between Jerusalem and Jericho before heading down to Ein Gedi. I talked non-stop with family and friends and colleagues and with their friends about the war and politics and religion. Stuck in place, all of the impressions drawn from the trip reflect in Israel the distance of a Diaspora Jew far away from the polemics and apologetics that dominate most of the discourse about the country back home in North America.

I’ll start with the four types of signs I saw consistently across city streets, roads, and highways. [1] In Israel, the hostage flyers and yellow flags and ribbons everywhere represent opposition to government policy in Gaza abandoning the hostages and continuing the war, often if not always in opposition to the government itself. [2] In blue and white, “together we will win” signs represent the government and signal support for the government policy of forever war. They are typically slapped onto state-sponsored public infrastructure (trains and prisons). [3] Stickers of dead soldiers, always smiling and brave, with encouraging, kitschy messages are posted everywhere, at bus stops and train stations and public utility poles. [4] Signs of political protest against the war and government. What didn’t I see? I know terrible  and genocidal things are said, as if casually, in private conversations and across social media and at government dominated media outlets about the war and about Arabs; and about the deadly violence in the occupied West Bank and territorial fever dreams particular to the national religious sector. What I did not see on the main roads and streets in Israel are signs and stickers calling for revenge, the destruction of Gaza, death to Arabs, support for Jewish settlements in Gaza, and the like. One would have thought there would be more of this, some of this. It was as if Hamas and Iran and Palestine barely registered at all in public spaces. As always and especially now, the Jewish discourse in Israel is closed-in and purely internal. Polls show only the Arab/Palestinian Israeli public has kept its moral and political compass.

What one sees in Israel is a demoralized country, a state of simmering rage and political listlessness, a small place still reeling from the impact of the Hamas attack on October 7. Only a small minority believe that the Prime Minister is acting in the national interest. People understand that more fighting in Gaza puts the hostages at grave risk, that the army is burned out after almost two years of intense conflict, that the country is isolated internationally. Polls consistently indicate that most people in Israel don’t even hear the word genocide and they deny that there is starvation in Gaza or even that there are innocent people in Gaza. At the same time, people also seem to understand that none of this is sustainable. The overwhelming majority of people want all hostages home and the war to end now. In the meantime, they do what normal people do. They go about their normal lives; restaurants and coffee shops are full; the streets are busy with traffic; but people are sad and anxious, except, it seems, on the religious right. I am not sure if I only imagined it, an almost mute state of suspended shock and silent disbelief pervading the public sphere. I left a week before a large national strike and the huge hostage and anti-war protest on August 17 that drew a million people out onto the streets over the course of the day.

In contrast to the clamor for ethnic cleansing and Gaza settlements on the religious Zionist right and pro-Netanyahu media platforms, the silence in the public at large reflects a systemic failure of leadership both in government and in the opposition. There is no clear political horizon in mainstream public discourse. No one knows what happens next. If Israel is catatonic, it is because there is no “day after.” After October 7, almost no one in Jewish society can say “peace.” No one will talk about Palestinian statehood, despite the vague talk about some alternative Arab governing authority in Gaza. From Netanyahu, there is nothing but spin and nothing is to be trusted. But this impression is part of the problem. According to polls, most people think that what motivates Netanyahu and his hold on power is a matter of pure political cynicism, not the national or public interest. This is, in fact, a misapprehension which blinds people to the ideological core that animates cynical bad faith in Israel and keeps him in power. Netanyahu wants to destroy the possibility of Palestinian statehood; and he understands that he, truly, is the only one who can secure that end. The “total victory” promised by Netanyahu and the religious right is already pyrrhic. Against Palestine, the full-on rightwing government of Israel elected in November 2022 has caused severe damage to the social solidarity that once defined the State of Israel and the social ethos that once marked Zionism as a secular movement resting upon collectivist-humanistic values.

For my entire adult life, what has continued to draw me to Israel relates to the centrifugal power of place and politics, indeed the power of a bubble. In my professional and personal life, I have come, over many years, to understand the country as a distinctly modern built environment, a deeply social enclave, a network of roads across a miniscule landscape, a place politically fraught to the core, an ingathering full of intelligence and creative potential and human warmth, a secular and global Jewish site and home, a house as it were. The State of Israel is not the negation, but the quintessence of diaspora. In Tel Aviv, I went to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People to see synagogue models, the image of little heterotopias lit up in the box-like container of the exterior shell, encased in glass vitrines. At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem there are lions and birds at reconstructed synagogue interiors stare back at you; human faces from the Chalcolithic period, and Canaanite ritual art. Representing the ancestors, these are human faces staring back at us today from time. From their estranged locus in the museum space, they are an index of contemporary Israel, a discordant mix of things at a hideous moment of crisis –a beautiful country, a grotesque political culture, bad social structure, sharp social tensions, and worn-out people who see no clear future ahead of them. Never not political, the place and its potential are buried alive in the pursuit of a religious war.

Before the big strike + demonstrations of August 17, I asked a friend why there were not hundreds of thousands on the streets to put an end to a war almost no one supports. She said very simply that they are all in reserves. The powerful democracy protests of 2023 were mostly divorced from the occupation, as if the occupation was not at the very heart of the democracy crisis in Israel and the war in Gaza. In a similar vein, the first hostage protests after October 7 were not necessarily anti-government. Yet in the many long days since then, the protests for hostages have since become anti-war. This summer, the destruction and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza began, bit by bit and sotto voce, to fold into mainline protests. It seems clear by now, but not clear to everyone, that allof these things are part of one total meta-crisis –the anti-judicial and anti-democracy coup engineered by Netanyahu and the religious right, the religious exemptions and Jewish supremacy tearing at the social contract, the collapse of good government over more than a decade of rightwing rule, the self-inflicted disaster of October 7, the plight of hostages abandoned by their government, the war and the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the dead and wounded soldiers, the violence of the occupation in the West Bank, fallout from the Second Intifada, the settlement project on steroids, and international isolation threatening the country.

Religion –namely Judaism, namely religious Zionism– is at the root of this meta-catastrophe. Polls indicate that Israel remains a rightwing country. At the same time, polls also indicate that only a minority, predominantly religious, align consistently with the government. Mainstream Israeli Jews recoil at the “messianists” from the occupied West Bank and their representatives in in the government willing to sacrifice the hostages for the sake of ethnic cleansing and building Jewish settlements in Gaza. But people won’t talk about religion or about Judaism itself. Since the Second Intifada, Jewish religion has become sacrosanct in Israel, a political talisman too dangerous to touch; or secular people on the liberal-left simply don’t completely understand religion and the power of myth; or Judaism is a hegemonic force, simply taken for granted and barely noticed, like an ambient element barely noticed in the air and water. But religion is at the core of this human debacle shaking contemporary Jewish life. In support of religious supremacy in society, the principle actors in government today against democracy and in support of the forever war in Gaza, apart from Netanyahu himself, come from religious sectors. They are the ones who represent Judaism in Israel.

As I heard at a conference panel from one prominent Jewish Studies scholar from the left in Israel, the problem isn’t simply the rightwing settler Judaism of Bezalel Smotrich. The struggle between civil society and religion in Irael today touches upon Judaism itself, including “our Judaism.” This was ata special panel, organized with some controversy, at the World Union of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University devoted to “The War in Gaza: Facts, Law, and Judaism.” (I went to listen and support colleagues.) Presentations included the reading of testimony from Palestinians civilians suffering in Gaza at the height of the starvation crisis. A legal scholar provided data and basic points relating to what is permitted and what is FORBIDDEN according to international laws of war. The final speaker addressed the place of Israel and the question of Jewish culture in the international community, in the world today, and human life as a universal value. She was not the first speaker highlighting that this war in Gaza is a “Jewish war,” i.e. the first war in the history of the country using Judaism in such an overtly cynical and violent way, the first war to secure what are the uniquely religious ends of the national right, i.e. ethnic cleansing and Jewish settlement in Gaza and the West Bank at all cost.

Representing more mainline liberal Jewish politics, it turned out that civil society, politics and social democracy, secularism and Judaism occupied the primary focus at the conference on “People, Society and State: Between Destruction and Hope: Israel as National Home of the Jewish People?” This was a one-day conference  hosted by the Eliezer Schweid Center for Society and Culture in Israel, hosted at the Hebrew Union College, also in Jerusalem. Invited to participate, Expecting normative “Jewish and democratic” discourse from the Israeli Jewish center-left, I was surprised by the more radical turn percolating at the conference. As framed by one of the conveners, Israel is in the middle of what is nothing less than a culture war. At this normative Zionist institute, with roots in Labor Zionism, colleagues, religious and non-religious, reversed the familiar “Jewish and democratic” formula in favor of a “democratic and Jewish”script. Gone was the “empty cart” critique of secular Israel and political Zionism. After the judicial coup and October 7 and the war in Gaza, more than one speaker insisted that democracy must come first and foremost, that the state has no legitimate role defining Jewishness or the Jewishness of the country, that Jewish religion in political life is a mortal threat to the State of Israel. Broadly recognized was the view of one speaker that the virtues and values of secular political Zionism and represent the only viable response to the catastrophe today wrought by the destructive synergy of nationalism and Judaism now represented by religious Zionism.

My own presentation at the conference looked at the idea of a “Jewish national home in Palestine” as premised on the claim that place is subject to basic polarities that are, on the one hand, essential to human flourishing, and, at the same time, subject to grotesque malformation. I cited Seyla Benhabib that, in response to crisis, it is the task of the critic “to illuminate those cracks in the totality, those fissures in the social net, those moments of disharmony and discrepancy, through which the untruth of the whole is revealed and glimmers of another life become visible.” In response to social crisis, humanist norms modulate the centripetal or ingathering power of placemaking on a foundation of democratic values. In tandem with norms, the utopian impulse affirms the centripetal power of space, opens out a critical and capacious sense of human community that flies in the face of a reality that can only be described, in the words of one Israeli columnist, “barbaric and belligerent.” Reflecting on the writing of essayist Jacquline Shohet Kahanoff from the 1950s and 1960s, I offered a utopian thought for today, one that imagines the place of the Jewish national house at peace and integrated into the space of the Levant.

In contrast to the Ashkenazi ethnocentrism of the classical Zionist project, it was my argument that we look for utopia imagined by writers such as Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, born in Egypt, she moved to Israel after statehood, and more contemporary writers on the Mizrachi left like Amiel Alcalay, and others. Their signal contribution to the discourse is to loosen up the conceptual field of Jews and Arabs, especially today when these formations seem so calcified, first, by nationalism and now super-hardened by religion. Levantine writers put under question the kind of nomadic placelessness with which Jews and Judaism are figured in so much postmodern and critical theory.  Unlike most forms of post-Zionism and anti-Zionism, Kahanoff and other Levantine writers after her took for granted that the Jews are not a foreign, European implant in the Middle East and North Africa. Contrasting Levantine writers to Kafka, Alcalay speaks to a “concrete and sensual attachment to the fact and memory of a native space.”

Finally, I looked to Herzl’s vision of the New Society in Palestine projected in the novel Old New Land. Imagining new and utopian possibilities of cosmopolitan friendship and fellowship at peace with its neighbors, networked to Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad. No doubt a product of colonial wish-fulfillment, the reader is given to see in the image of the Old-New Land Jews and Arabs and European mixing together. They do so imagined on the normative basis of equality and friendship, not prejudice and domination (i.e. those essential features that defined for Albert Memmi the relation of the colonizer to the colonized). Imagined as a product of cooperative action, the cultivated landscape itself has been rendered open, not closed. David Litvak, Herzl’s prototype of the young Zionist, insists that the New Society established in Palestine belongs to everyone. Opposed to the forces of Jewish religious supremacy, Litvak proudly declares, “Religion had been excluded from public affairs once and for all. The New Society did not care whether a man sought the eternal verities in a temple, a church or a mosque, in an art museum or philharmonic concert.”  In this utopian vision, the New Society was not even  a state, but rather a cooperative association composed of affiliate cooperatives. But this was the danger. Anticipating the future, Litvak warned his fellow citizens that “all your cultivation is worthless and your fields will revert to barrenness unless you foster liberal ideas, magnanimity, and a love of mankind” (p. 153, see also pp.259, 284).

In one way, and only in one way, can Israel be called a “model society.” Israel is a model society not because it is “Jewish and democratic,” and certainly not because it is “democratic and Jewish,” or a fair and just society. Without confusing ethos and ethics, what defines Israel as a “model society” is the internal solidarity, one with deep roots in Jewish tradition, that defines Jewish society, a social contract bonding people together. The democracy crisis in Israel demands more democracy and better democracy, new social contracts and new social relations, a fair resolution to the war with Palestine, stronger pluralism, and Arab-Jewish cooperation and co-existence. After a long and bitter summer, representing majority public opinion, hundreds of thousands of citizens went on strike and were out on the streets in mid-August to support 50 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, only 20 of whom are still alive, and to end the war in Gaza. Israel is at once a normal place and a place of trauma. After the complete shredding of social contracts and the status quo ante, the death and destruction and waste of life, the future has to rest on a hope that can only be utopian. Utopias are, to this point, “very much wish-fulfillments, and hallucinatory visions in desperate times” (Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p.233)