What Happened to “WE”? |
Israel was born in a time when “WE” wasn’t a slogan. It was a survival system.
The pioneers weren’t saints, and the early story wasn’t as tidy as nostalgia makes it. There were deep injustices and enduring wounds. But there was a prevailing ethic that said: we will carry one another because we have no other choice. You could disagree with your neighbor’s politics, his prayers, his accent, his food, his whole approach to life—and still build a road together, guard the perimeter together, absorb immigrants together, bury the fallen together.
That “WE” was forged in scarcity, danger, and shared work. It was strengthened by institutions that made mutual obligation feel normal: the army, the unions, the public ethos of building, the kibbutz and the cooperative spirit even outside it. The sabra myth—with all its flaws—had one central demand: don’t be delicate about the group. The group is the point.
Somewhere along the way, we became a different kind of normal.
Today’s Israel can still summon breathtaking solidarity—but mostly under fire. In routine politics and budgets, we increasingly look like a society of sectors and tribes, each convinced it must take as much as it can while it can. Not because everyone is greedy, but because the system teaches people to fear being the sucker. The commons becomes a buffet, and politics becomes a contest of elbows.
In defense, the “WE” reappears—often instantly. But even there it does not fully hold, because the burdens of defense and service are not shared evenly, and we have turned that fact into an ongoing civil argument rather than a national emergency. We fight external enemies with unity, and then return to internal bargaining with a quiet assumption that someone else will pay for the roof over all of us.
Hillel saw this long before there was a Knesset, long before there were budgets and coalition agreements:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
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