Ronit Heyd is Vice President and Director of the Center for Israeli & Jewish Identity at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
On October 7, 2023, at 12:30pm, I was driving tensely down Highway 6. With me in the car were three very smelly, very muddy teenage boys—my son and two of his friends—who had just completed a mountain biking competition. Actually, they didn’t complete it. They finished all the downhill “runs,” and did all the “stages,” but without any ranking or scores, as, midway through the event, the timekeeper, a reserve pilot, had dropped his equipment and dashed to the army. In the car, the boys were only vaguely aware of what was going on. They had seen the worried faces of many parents at the competition who were whispering incredulously that friends were bidding farewell to them over WhatsApp; they felt the confused anxiety as we rushed them back to the car; but since I wanted to keep the horrors away from them—this was when I still believed I could shield my children from the most sickening truths of terror and war—I had the radio on only in my earbuds as I drove back to Jerusalem, the boys babbling in the back seat, comparing “drops” and “berms,” oblivious to the shock and disbelief I was experiencing.
Several people in the kibbutzim of the Gaza Envelope called the media in despair that morning, and they were begging, live on the radio, for the army, the police, someone to come and save them. As I listened to their anguished cries for help, a thought shot through my head: “Well, that’s it for the judiciary reform. Bygones.” This government is done. Netanyahu is over. Yariv Levin is over. They have failed us in unimaginable ways. I assumed that their immense leadership failure—and this was when the number of known casualties was still only in tens—would be a gamechanger for Israel, and it would lead, I wanted to believe, sooner rather than later, to a major shift in Israel’s direction.
Hell, was I ever wrong.