Netanyahu, heed the warning thunder of ancient Jewish history

It is simply impossible to ignore the warning thunder of ancient Jewish history.

On the eve of Tisha B’Av, when the Jewish people suffered the loss of its two biblical Temples, recognized and mourned to this day as punishment for our ancestors’ internal intolerances and hatreds, today’s third, largely glorious exercise in sovereignty is being threatened — not by external enemies but, again, by a surging internal divide.

On Sunday night, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, two massed sets of campaigners marched simultaneously under separate seas of the same blue and white flag, with contradictory goals for our tiny, precious nation — the two sides of a rift that is tearing the country apart, pitching Jew against Jew, constricting our economy, alienating our friends, weakening our military.

And at this precise moment of existential truth, the leader who has propelled Israel down the steep path to potential oblivion has found himself laid low in a hospital bed, reminded of the fragility of human power, of the limitations and the brevity of our time here.

Not all is lost. A readiness to fulfill that most fundamental of Jewish ethical obligations — to treat others as we would wish to be treated — remains widespread. We saw it with the ultra-Orthodox women who brought water to the largely secular Jews marching into Jerusalem this weekend on their modern-day pilgrimage to our historic capital, one of whom told the TV cameras that she didn’t think she agreed with their cause but that she believed she had much to learn from them. We saw it Sunday night, when large numbers of departing and arriving rival demonstrators crossed escalator paths at Jerusalem’s shiny new train station, and cheered each other, shouting professions of love and brotherhood as they headed in their opposite directions. We saw it in the joint pro- and anti-overhaul prayer gathering and march Sunday morning that began at the very symbol of our ancient loss and reverence, the Western Wall.

Not all is lost, clearly, because of the passion for this country that this disastrous moment in our modern history has unleashed. What’s needed is leadership that refocuses that passion on strengthening what unites us rather than exacerbating what does not. “This country is a miracle,” the former justice minister Ayelet Shaked, a woman of the political right who is married to a pilot, veritably wailed on Sunday night. “Are we going to throw it all away on an argument over ‘reasonableness’?”

Only Benjamin Netanyahu can truly explain why he has acted the way he has these past months — shamefully embracing some of Jewish Israel’s most radical leaders in his desperate search for electoral votes last year, placing Jewish supremacists at the heart of the coalition he then constructed, agreeing in principle to legislation that would shatter the democratic and tolerant Jewish state envisaged in the Declaration of Independence, and working obsessively to sideline the judges who would stand in his way.

But, no, it’s not too late — not too late for Netanyahu to rescue Israel from a repetition of history. To halt the evil decree and seek consensus. To face down Yariv Levin, the obsessive justice minister he empowered, a man capable of acknowledging that the elected leadership must not control all branches of governance while pushing legislation to precisely that effect. To defy the zealots he seated at his cabinet table. To heed the concerns of Israel’s modern Zionist warriors, his own peers from the IDF and those of the subsequent generations, telling him that they have risked and will risk their lives for the kingdom, but not for a king.

It is impossible for any of us in Israel right now to ignore the warning thunder of ancient Jewish history. But it rumbles loudest for Netanyahu, confronted by his own mortality even as he has sought excessive power. And it obligates him to marginalize the toxic radicals and heal our precious country.

Israel is indeed a miracle. And we simply cannot, must not, throw it away.