Israel Doesn’t Have One Purpose. It Has Five. That’s the Problem. |
The fracture in Israeli society is not a failure of leadership or civility. It’s a war between four incompatible visions of what this country is actually for — held together by one thing, and increasingly nothing else.
Every country has arguments. Israel has something different. The debates that split Israeli society — over judicial reform, settlements, religious authority, Arab citizens, the meaning of October 7 — feel different in kind, not just degree, from ordinary political disagreement. They feel existential because they are. They are not arguments about how to pursue Israel’s purpose. They are arguments about what that purpose is.
There is one answer that every Israeli, left to right, secular to haredi, Jewish to Arab, gives the same way when the question is pushed to bedrock: Jewish survival cannot be entrusted to the goodwill of others. The state exists because it must exist. That conviction is not a policy. It is the foundation beneath every policy. It is the one thing that has held Israel together through wars, assassinations, economic crises, and political earthquakes that would have torn less constitutionally resilient societies apart.
But beneath that shared foundation, four genuinely distinct visions of Israel’s purpose have been competing since before 1948, and have never been resolved. They are not misunderstandings. They are not failures of dialogue. They are incommensurable. And they are now, for the first time, in open war with each other.
The first is Israel as fortress. The state exists to make Jews safe. Full stop. Security is not a means to other ends — it is the end. Everything else — democracy, diplomacy, international legitimacy, the rights of minorities — is negotiable when security demands it. This vision does not require villains; it requires only the internalization of a lesson written in the blood of the twentieth century. Its adherents are not wrong about what history teaches. They are, however, vulnerable to a particular failure: the slow substitution of the metric for the purpose. When the measure of success becomes military supremacy rather than the flourishing of the people that supremacy is meant to protect, the fortress has become a prison, and nobody noticed when the door closed.
The second is Israel as civilization. Ahad Ha’am understood, before Herzl’s political Zionism had fully crystallized, that the Jewish people did not merely need a safe address. They needed a home in which Jewish civilization — its language, literature, law, philosophy, music, argument — could be expressed without the distortions of perpetual diaspora existence. The Hebrew revival, the most remarkable act of cultural resurrection in modern history, is this vision’s greatest achievement. A liturgical language became a living tongue. A people scattered across forty countries now share a literature, a humor, a set of arguments conducted in the same words as the prophets. This is extraordinary. But it is also fragile — because the Israel that is emerging politically is increasingly hostile to the civic and intellectual culture that made that renaissance possible.
The third is Israel as ethical testament. The Declaration of Independence said it plainly: the state would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” This is not a diplomatic nicety. It is the “light unto the nations” translated into constitutional language — the claim that the Jewish return to sovereignty is also an opportunity to demonstrate that a society organized around Jewish ethical principles can be built and sustained. The adherents of this vision — concentrated but not exclusive to the secular left — experience the current political direction not as a policy disagreement but as a betrayal of what the state was built to mean. They are not wrong to feel this. Whether they are right about the solution is a different question.
The fourth is Israel as sacred fulfillment. The land is not territory. It is covenant. The return is not a political event. It is the beginning of redemption. This vision, which has grown from a minority position to a governing force since 1967, does not fit into the categories the other three share, because it is not operating in the same register. You cannot negotiate with a divine promise. You cannot subject a covenant to a cost-benefit analysis. The extraordinary motivational power of this vision — the settlers who built outposts on rocky hillsides out of genuine conviction, not cynicism — is real. So is its structural incompatibility with the first three visions whenever they conflict, which is increasingly always.
These four visions are not reconcilable by better leadership or more civil discourse. They produce different answers to every serious question: What is the land for? Who belongs here? What can be traded and what cannot? What is owed to non-Jewish citizens? What is Israel’s relationship to diaspora Jewry? What would victory look like?
The shared foundation — Jewish survival requires a Jewish state — is real and should not be underestimated. It has held before. But it is not a purpose. It is a precondition. And a state that knows only what it cannot afford to lose, without knowing what it is for, generates with great energy in every direction simultaneously. Some of those directions are contradicting each other. The result is not argument. It is fracture.
The tradition that produced the Talmud built its most enduring achievement not by resolving its arguments but by making the argument itself the practice — by institutionalizing the capacity to hold incompatible positions in productive tension rather than forcing premature resolution. That tradition is available to this state. It requires, first, the honesty to acknowledge what the argument is actually about.
It is not about judicial appointments. It is about what Israel is for.