Israel vs. ‘Israeliness’: Why It Matters Now |
There is a sentence I have been hearing for two years now, in different accents, in different rooms, in different time zones. Sometimes from a student in Sydney. Sometimes from a friend over coffee in Tel Aviv. Sometimes from a colleague’s mother in New Jersey, sometimes from a stranger who finds me at a conference and lowers their voice before they say it.
“I still love Israel. I just don’t know how to talk about it anymore.”
It comes from people who have been showing up for Israel their whole lives. Who grew up at Jewish summer camps, who fundraised, who marched, who made aliyah and went back, who didn’t make aliyah and felt guilty about it, who built businesses here, who buried family here. They are not disengaged. They are not anti. They are tired. And underneath the tiredness, something quieter and more worrying- they are losing the words.
I run Citizen Café, a global community of around 20,000 Hebrew learners across more than 25 countries. My team, over 100 Israeli teachers, marketers, technologists, speak every day with hundreds of Jews and non-Jews who have, for one reason or another, chosen to keep their door to Israel open. Some are fluent. Some are beginners. Some haven’t been to Israel in fifteen years. Some live ten minutes from my office. What I have learned from being in the middle of this conversation, week after week, is that something is shifting in how people are relating to this place. And almost nobody is naming it precisely.
For most of my life, “Israel” and “Israeliness” were the same word. You loved Israel; you loved everything about it- the politics, the land, the army, the food, the chutzpah, the Friday night tables, the absurdity of buying tomatoes at the shuk. It was one bundle. You didn’t separate the strands because you didn’t need to.
After October 7th, and especially in the long, exhausting tail of these last two years, the bundle came apart for a lot of people. And I........