The State Must Return |
A poll is not a covenant, and a majority is not yet responsibility. Numbers may indicate a political opening, but they do not by themselves constitute repair. They become meaningful only when they are carried by a public act capable of restoring measure, limit, and obligation.
This is why the latest Israeli surveys should not be read with premature relief. They may show that a majority against Benjamin Netanyahu is now politically possible, that Gadi Eisenkot is emerging as a more trusted figure, and that the anti-Netanyahu camp can cross the numerical threshold required to form a government. Yet Jewish political life cannot be reduced to arithmetic, and Israel cannot be repaired by counting alone.
The question, therefore, is not only whether Netanyahu can be removed. The deeper question is whether Israel can be returned from possession to responsibility. A government may change while the structure of capture remains intact, and a coalition may replace another coalition while the state continues to function as an object held by those who claim to protect it.
For too long, the state has been treated as a private instrument: a fortress of personal survival, a family asset, a coalition machine, a shield against accountability, and a mechanism through which fear is translated into obedience. Institutions have been bent toward one man’s continuity, public language has been exhausted by permanent emergency, and security has been invoked so often that it has sometimes ceased to protect life and has begun to protect power.
This is not merely a political problem. It is an ethical one. In Jewish terms, the danger is idolatry, not the crude idolatry of ancient images, but the more sophisticated idolatry of political indispensability. It is the belief that one man, one faction, one machine, or one permanent emergency can stand where responsibility itself should stand.
A society begins to lose its freedom when it is taught that without the........