Israel’s anthem yearns for us ‘to be a free people, in our own land.’ We dare not fail
These past 18 months, we have struggled as never before in our modern history. We let down our guard and our enemies pounced. Worse still, our internal rifts are widening. We can and must heal them if we are to revive
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
For 77 years, Israel, a small, ancient nation revived in a merciless neighborhood, has defied all odds, survived and largely flourished.
As it mourns its fallen defenders and celebrates its independence on Wednesday and Thursday, its population has grown twelvefold since 1948, and this year, for the first time, exceeds 10 million people. Forty-five percent of all the Jews on Earth now make their homes here.
But these past 18 months, we have struggled as never before in our modern history. We let down our guard ahead of October 7, 2023, and, as we always knew they would, our enemies pounced.
It was horrific — and it could have been much worse. The thousands of Hamas murderers who burst through our pitifully underdefended border would have penetrated deeper and massacred, burned, raped and abducted more of our people were it not for the extraordinary courage of the outnumbered uniformed forces and civilians who resisted the invasion. The blood-red flood of murderous assistance Gaza’s terrorist army had expected to receive from Iran and its well-armed proxies, most especially Hezbollah, did not immediately materialize. And Israel, shaken and horrified by the devastating consequences of its unfathomable complacency, nonetheless refused to retreat into paralysis and, almost immediately, began to fight back.
But as we mark Memorial Day and Independence Day, the losses remain almost unbearable, and our national confidence, our sense of security, our faith in our political and military leaders and protectors, is far from restored.
Worse still, the pain and uncertainty caused by the monstrous blows inflicted by our enemies is exacerbated by our widening internal rifts.
We cannot maintain unity even in the struggle for the return of the 59 hostages who are still, unthinkably, locked in Hamas captivity, at least 35 of them dead, and the rest in daily life-threatening peril. “Hatikvah,” the national anthem, sung repeatedly at ceremonies nationwide this week, yearns for Israel to be “a free people, in our own land.” Our hostages have none of that. And the matter of their fate is a political battlefield, an issue of national argument, waged along partisan lines.
The prime minister insists he is doing everything in his power to bring them home, but that this can only be achieved by relentlessly increasing the military pressure on Hamas. And yet a year has now passed since he asserted that victory over Hamas was a mere “step away.”
Not coincidentally, the premature termination of the January hostage-ceasefire deal that he drew up, and the current re-intensifying of the war in Gaza, were moves insisted upon by his two far-right coalition partners as their conditions for keeping him in power.
Our people’s army, many of whose reservists have spent more time at the front than at their homes and jobs these past 18 months, is hamstrung and increasingly aggrieved by the exemption from national service untenably provided to almost the entire ultra-Orthodox community — a condition of Netanyahu’s two ultra-Orthodox coalition partners for their support.
So thoroughly disconnected from the national cause, interest, ethos and pain was the leader of one of these two parties, Yitzhak Goldknopf of United Torah Judaism, that he only reluctantly agreed, at the eleventh hour, in the face of anguished opposition by bereaved families, not to speak at Wednesday’s Memorial Day ceremony at the Kiryat Gat military cemetery. So thoroughly disconnected from national sensitivities was the government secretariat that it assigned Goldknopf such an engagement in the first place — a month after he was filmed at his nephew’s wedding dancing with ultra-Orthodox fellow celebrants to an anti-Zionist ditty whose lyrics reject service in the army of the infidel nation that funds and protects them and calls such service worse than death.
We reached a new nadir of leadership division this month, with the prime minister — the one key leader trying to evade responsibility for October 7 — and the head of the Shin Bet domestic security service publicly denouncing each other as arrogant, self-interested liars.
The particular legal battle between Netanyahu and Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar was defanged somewhat by Bar’s announcement on Monday that he will resign on June 15, obviating the need for a High Court ruling on whether the cabinet had the right to fire him when it did so last month. But the wider legal war of which this was a part, and which revolves around the determination of Netanyahu to center all power and authority in his own hands, rolls rendingly on.
As October 7 should have made unmistakably clear but, incredibly, all too evidently did not, Israel cannot afford the luxury of debilitating internal dissent. Its external enemies are too dangerous. “Enough division! Enough polarization! Enough hatred!” President Isaac Herzog implored last night, at the opening of the Memorial Day ceremonies, held at the Western Wall, the last remnant of curtailed Biblical-era Jewish sovereignty. “We must not, by our own hands, bring about the destruction of our national home.”
Yes, 10 million people live here now. We need this state to rebuild, to revive, to reunite. To survive, and to thrive anew. Many of the 55 percent of Jews who haven’t made their homes here are finding life in the Diaspora hard to endure amid spiking antisemitism. They may find they need Israel, too.
At 11 on Wednesday morning, for two long minutes, sirens wailed nationwide and Israel came to a standstill in memory, grief, respect and gratitude for those who lost their lives in the defense of this tiny, essential nation. As the sirens faded, four fighter jets flew over the Jerusalem area, symbolizing both respect for the dead and the determined capacity to protect the living. Memorial ceremonies then began at military cemeteries around the country, and they all ended with “Hatikvah” and that central yearning ambition: “To be a free people, in our own land.”
We dare not, and we must not, allow ourselves to fail.
The Times of Israel Community.