AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER A QUESTION HAS accompanied me: what would your father say? Rarely is it the curious question of someone who really wants to know; mostly it is a taunt from someone who wants to win an argument without having a conversation. Many times, I ignore the question and the questioners, if only because they have no interest whatsoever in what my mother would say. Her comments were no less sharp and incisive than his. Our togetherness, she and he and a bit of me, brought into the world the baggage that I offer my children to adopt.
Between my parents, who have passed on, and my children, I am a link that awoke one morning a few years ago with great anger. It was during the bloody days of the second Palestinian uprising. A great silence and greater bewilderment enveloped the country. Death took its toll on both peoples, and we were its emissaries and victims. All the atrocities, killing, and bereavement had no meaning or purpose. Day after day. Terrorist attacks and retaliation, revenge and counter-revenge. That morning everything burst inside me. When I asked myself why, I realized that of all the people I was angry at, I was angry at my beloved and missed father most of all. He had been dead for a few years and the Palestinian uprising and Israel’s responses were no longer his responsibility, and still all my arrows were aimed at him.
For weeks I continued the examination—why? Why the anger, and why toward him specifically? I reached the conclusion that I was angry with him because he, who was so important to me as a father and teacher, did not leave me anything written, no guide to the perplexed or a spiritual will about his conception of the roots of Israeli reality or its future directions. In our imagined conversations, I asked him again and again what he would have thought had he been with us. But from the book he did not write for me there were no answers.
In those days, I wanted to leave something for my children, wherever life may take them, and I began to write. I don’t know what challenges they will have to face, and I have no idea what decisions they will make in the moments of truth in their lives. But wherever their winds take them, I want to leave them materials from which they can always stitch sails of thought and content that will fit their size. I have no property to leave them, just some insights as provisions for the journey of life, raw materials for shaping their lives. So that they will at least have an answer to the question: what would your father say? Despite the confusion of the times, do your utmost not to err like many do in distinguishing good from bad. And despite the nationalistic wave, which presents itself as the calling card of contemporary Israel, never forget the values of our home, the all-embracing humanism that is our safe haven. Never despair about the political and social reality. Fight it and change it. And never flee your inner truth, even if it means periods of loneliness and living as a minority. Because truth will out, and ultimately many of the truths of the minority became the majority’s strategy for salvation. These are important and defining lessons that my parents drummed into me. But alas, they are not being passed on to the next generation, to Israel’s grandchildren, who need them more than ever.
These days of the early twenty-first century appear to me as days of profound change against the background of global, local, and personal upheaval. That is why this book ultimately is a personal document, written at a stormy time as I perceive it, as an individual Israeli. Around the time of this book’s publication, Israel, the region, and the international community will mark fifty years since the Six-Day War. That is a very long period in a person’s life, but very short in the annals of history. There are few chapters of the past like this one, in which we as individuals and as a collective achieved so much, while making so many mistakes. Years in which greatness and folly were intertwined. This duality requires a great deal of soul-searching, of which this book is a part. I had the privilege of living and acting in this chapter of the history of my people, the Jewish people, and I have a few thoughts, insights, and reflections on the time, as well as about myself and others.
I’ve already written a few books. Each one has moved me a bit closer to the next, and given me another measure of courage to reveal myself to myself, and become almost entirely revealed to my readers. “Why on earth are you summing up your life? You’re only halfway there,” many people told me while this book was being written. They were right. I really did not try to write an autobiography. With all due respect to my public career, I’m not important enough to thread an entire period of history through the eye of my needle as a writer. All I wanted to do was to find and share the lost Israeli places between current affairs and history. Therefore, this is just a reflection and expression of what my eyes have seen. My personal experiences are just a means to help me decipher some of the riddles of Israeli existence. In this book I open parts of my personal life to the public in order to add another dimension of meaning to what is happening to us. Mine is an Israeli voice that tries to be different from the formal, shrill voices blaring from official Israeli loudspeakers. I’m trying to add another sound to the few heard from my generation, the generation that followed the establishment of the state and has not found enough expression, and the generation of religious Zionism that reshuffled the whole deck here and also is rather mute and very deaf.
I have anger and consolation, but I am not a prophet and do not come from a family of prophets. I just see history and current affairs as prisms through which I can prepare for the future. The following pages are therefore reflections of this sort, about current affairs that became history, and events happening right now, and those still to come. Brexit and Trump, the populist movements and the contemporary setback of liberal democracies are details, important but fragmentary. So here is my modest attempt to comprehend the larger frame, the “gestalt of the zeitgeist,” the way it is perceived through Israeli, Jewish, and liberal lenses.
In Days to Come is the fruit of profound gratitude. First and foremost to Noa Manheim, a friend and study partner, my Hebrew editor and critic, and to Alessandra Bastagli, editorial director at Nation Books. Many great thanks to the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and to Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo, who gave me a home and a fellowship, a social network and circles of warmth and wisdom that few have the privilege of having in their lives. To the wise Ivan Krastev and Anna Ganeva, who involved me in the activities of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria. Their invitation to the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna enabled me to broaden my horizons and gave me time to write. To the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, in whose quiet and enveloping library the book took shape, and to the people of “Molad” for the lessons they have taught me.
And above all, my relatives who are around me and in me. To Yael, my incomparable companion. To my wonderful children, their families, and Hillel and Talila, who are always with us. To Lucian and Janine, my parents-in-law. To my sister, brother-in-law, and my nephews and nieces, who took the trouble to read, weed, and plant. They turned the feelings into words and a melody. When I think about you, my parents gather in me and sing along with us the song of our life.