It is now nearly five years since I left government, and Israel is facing the deepest crisis of my lifetime, and its own. The issue is not about an individual prime minister. It’s not about left or right, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, secular or religious, rich or poor. It is—to borrow a word often used, and abused, in Israel over the past few years—existential. It is about whether the country whose birth I witnessed, for which I fought for thirty-five years, and in whose government I served for nearly a decade can survive as a democracy under the rule of law, true not only to Jewish history and traditions but to the moral code at its core. Whether we can still aspire to be a “light unto the nations,” or even a light unto ourselves.
The cause to which I’ve devoted my life—redeeming the dream of Zionism in a strong, free, self-confident, democratic Jewish state—is under threat. This is not mainly because of Hizbollah or Hamas, ISIS, or even Iran, all of which I feel confident in saying, as a former head of military intelligence, chief of staff, and defense minister, are real yet surmountable challenges. The main threat comes from inside: from the most right-wing, deliberately divisive, narrow-minded, and messianic government we have seen in our seven-decade history. It has sought to redefine Zionism as being about one thing only: ensuring eternal control over the whole of biblical Judaea and Samaria, or as the outside world knows it, the West Bank, even if doing so leaves us significantly less secure. In the past few years, it has also proven ready to erode, vilify, demonize, or delegitimize any check or criticism that might impede that goal: a free press, open debate, universities, the rule of law, even the ethical code of the Israeli military.
The ideological engine of the government has been driven by far-right politicians like Avigdor Lieberman and, above all, Naftali Bennett, the leader of a religious-nationalist party called Jewish Home. A former aide to Bibi Netanyahu, Bennett embodies the “Greater Israel” agenda, the idea that there is a divine imperative for Jews to settle and permanently control the entirety of Judaea and Samaria. During my final period as Bibi’s defense minister, he was head of the joint settlement council on the West Bank, and led the drive against our agreeing to President Obama’s call for a settlement freeze.
The political tone of the government has been set by Bibi. Well before the emergence of Donald Trump or Steve Bannon in the United States, he pioneered the tactic of denouncing the media for purveying “fake news” and fomenting some grand, left-wing conspiracy to unseat him. He has gone after academics in Israeli universities, the judiciary, human-rights organizations and other NGOs, as well as a number of our top generals, in a similar vein. Other ministers have threatened the independence of the Supreme Court. They’ve backed a statute to retroactively “legalize” 4,000 settlers’ homes built on privately owned Palestinian land on the West Bank. They have brought pressure on university faculties through a “code of ethics” that has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with combating Bibi’s phantom “conspiracy.” And they have demonized people from the left and “the Arabs”—including the Arab citizens inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Why do I see all of this as part of an existential threat to the founding purpose of Israel? Bibi himself should know at least part of the answer. He and Yoni were raised by a devoted follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the towering figures of pre-state Zionism. Jabotinsky envisioned an Israel stretching from the Mediterranean across the Jordan River, encompassing all of Judaea and Samaria, as well as present-day Jordan. But his position was rooted in a belief that the Arabs of Palestine would never accept, or willingly coexist with, a Jewish state. Jabotinsky was also a classic nineteenth-century liberal intellectual. No less than David Ben-Gurion, he saw a future state of Israel as a democracy, culturally vibrant and pluralistic, governed by the rule of law. The prospect of an Israeli government eroding all of that, and taking aim at any individual or institution standing in its way, would have appalled him.
Even more fundamental to the threat is the central policy aim that has been driving the government that was formed after the election in 2015: to kill off any remaining possibility of a Palestinian state and ensure that only one state—Israel—will exist on the biblical land of Palestine. Even just a few years ago, when I ended my time as defense minister, there was a fairly broad, if tacit, political consensus among Israelis, from center left to center right, about the main element of any eventual political resolution of our conflict with the Palestinians. There would be two states. Israel would, for national security reasons, retain the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the large “settlement blocs”—almost all of them around Jerusalem or fairly close to our 1967 border, and within the security fence that was finally completed under Arik Sharon’s prime ministership. But consensus had never been achieved on the nearly one hundred smaller settlements in more isolated areas of Judaea and Samaria. While the largest of these contains a few thousand residents, some have only a couple of dozen families. In all, they account for barely one-fifth of all West Bank settlers. Their aim was always political. It was to surround the main Arab towns and cities and to prevent the establishment of a geographically viable Palestinian state. Far from being an asset to Israel’s security, they are a burden. They are, as intended, a political roadblock: not just to a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, but to the kind of unilateral Israeli disengagement on the West Bank that I, and increasingly others, have advocated as a fallback as long as such an agreement proves impossible.
Beyond the damage to our security, the “one state” that the pro-settlement ideologues envision would be a Jewish state, or so they would have us believe. Yet beyond the fact that it would still have the Star of David on its flag, that’s a delusion. The combined Arab population of the West Bank, Gaza, and pre-1967 Israel is already nearing—or by some estimates, has surpassed—the number of Israeli Jews. The demographic trends point toward a “Jewish” state in which Jews will inexorably become a minority. I suppose it’s theoretically possible the one-state advocates would safeguard the democratic norms and institutions that the early Zionists, whether pro-Ben-Gurion or pro-Jabotinsky, took as a given. But that, too, requires believing in a fantasy: that they would extend the right to vote to an additional 3 million or more Palestinians on the West Bank.
During all my years in public life, I reacted with a mix of horror and anger to the blinkered, or sometimes simply anti-Semitic, ideologues abroad who accused Israel of engaging in “apartheid.” But many in Israel and abroad point to the fact that Palestinians, unlike Arabs within our pre-1967 frontiers, are subject to a structurally different legal and political system than Jewish settlers who may live just a few hundred yards away from them on the West Bank. The settlers are Israeli citizens. They are governed by, and enjoy full rights under, Israeli law. The West Bank Arabs are subject to the civil regulations of the Palestinian Authority, overlaid by Israeli occupation. As long as this was an interim arrangement, with the understanding that our ultimate goal was a political resolution of our conflict with the Palestinians, that was defensible. But under a one-state vision, it will become harder and harder to rebut comparisons made with the old South Africa. A Jewish minority ruling over an ever-increasing, largely voteless, Arab majority will also be a recipe for deep division among Israelis and violence with the Palestinians. Even, possibly, a kind of permanent civil war: a Middle Eastern Belfast or Bosnia. It will pose a new political challenge for Israel as well. The demand from Palestinians and their supporters will no longer be for a state of their own. It will be for a simpler, more straightforward principle, one carrying much greater resonance in America, Europe, and democratic countries around the world: one person, one vote. Majority rule.
* * *
The fork in the road for Zionism came in 1967. Like most Israelis, I was far too caught up in the aftermath of our victory in the Six-Day War to take much notice. Israel’s sense of vulnerability, the feeling that our existence always hung in the balance, seemed gone for good. Within the space of a week, we had defeated the combined armies of Egypt and Syria and Jordan. The territory under our control had more than tripled. We felt secure and, yes, proud to have turned the tables on enemy states that had vowed to erase our country from the map since 1948. Even the many Israelis who, like me, were not religiously observant felt an emotional tremor, and a deep sense of connection, on visiting the Western Wall of the ancient temple in the Old City of Jerusalem, or the places in Judaea and Samaria where the story of the Jewish people began.
When the first West Bank settlements were established in the decade following the Six-Day War, I don’t recall feeling there was anything wrong. The decision was taken under Labor prime ministers: Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and then Yitzhak Rabin. The two initial sites—Gush Etzion in the Bethlehem hills south of Jerusalem, and Kiryat Arba on the outskirts of Hebron—seemed, in a way, the closing of a circle, the righting of past wrongs. Gush Etzion was where “The 35” were killed in January 1948, shortly before I turned six years old, and where the remaining defenders were murdered and mutilated a few months later. Hebron was one of the oldest areas of continuous Jewish settlement in Palestine, until dozens of Jews were killed there in 1929. Soon afterward, the British authorities evacuated the surviving members of the community.
I don’t even recall worrying that Kiryat Arba was promoted, organized, and set up by a group of Orthodox rabbis whose settlement agenda was not rooted in security, like Labor’s, but in Jews’ religious right to all of biblical Israel. I still thought of religious Zionism in terms of its early guide and leader, Avraham Yitzhak Kook. The first chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine until his death in 1935, Rav Kook was not just a towering Torah scholar, but a subtle and probing intellect. For him, the prospect of a Jewish state on our ancient land was an almost miraculous gift from God. But faced with the reality that most of the Jews at the forefront of making it happen were nonreligious, he chose to embrace rather than denounce, denigrate, or try to delegitimize them. He did not condone their failure to keep the laws of Judaism. But he concluded that if God had chosen nonobservant Jews as part of our return to our land, a mere human being, even a chief rabbi, was hardly in a position to second-guess Him. In terms of the two major themes of Jewish and Zionist thought—the importance of the unity of the Jewish people, Am Yisrael, and of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel—Rav came down on the side of the people over the land. In fact, I, as many other nonreligious Israelis, always insisted that we have a natural, historic right to have a Jewish state in the biblical land. The debate was always about to what extent that “right” should be exercised given the realities of security, international legitimacy, and other considerations.
In the years after the 1967 war, that changed. Kiryat Arba, the other religious settlements that followed, and the nationalist-religious movement organizing them, known as Gush Emunim, took their inspiration from the late Rav Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook. For the younger Rabbi Kook, it was the Land of Israel that held primacy. By the mid-1970s, Gush Emunim had begun to dominate the settlement enterprise. Even then, since Rabin was prime minister, that set off no real alarm bells for me. Rabin was guided by Labor’s “Alon Plan,” under which virtually all settlement activity would be limited to three security bands: along the 1967 border with the West Bank; on the ridge of hills running down its midsection; and in the Jordan River valley. The assumption was that when we finally managed to make peace with Jordan, the rest of the West Bank, including all the main Arab towns and cities, would revert to King Hussein’s rule.
When Menachem Begin and the Likud supplanted three decades of Labor-led government in 1977, the Alon Plan was shelved. Begin believed that Judaea and Samaria were, and must remain, part of Israel. He imagined a limited form of self-government for the Palestinians, but was inalterably opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Crucially, he also included a former army general in his cabinet who proved eager to foreclose any such possibility on the ground. Arik Sharon had made little secret of wanting to become defense minister. When Begin instead made him agriculture minister, he brought a military single-mindedness to his role as settlement czar. Arik was no more religiously observant than I. When he argued in favor of the settlement program, it was still primarily on the grounds of security. But he knowingly co-opted Gush Emunim’s enthusiasm, determination, and religious sense of purpose. It was Arik who backed and helped implement the plan to establish dozens of new settlements explicitly intended to encircle the major Palestinian population centers of the West Bank, and to foreclose the possibility of a geographically coherent Palestinian state.
Nearly forty years on, Arik is no longer with us. It is worth remembering that his last major policy initiative was a unilateral pullout of all Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza. He also ordered the evacuation of four isolated settlements in the northern part of the West Bank, in a preliminary signal he might apply the Gaza model to a broader Israeli disengagement from Judaea and Samaria as well. Though I knew Arik well, I can’t say whether he would have followed through on that. But I do know that both prime ministers who followed him—Ehud Olmert, and Bibi as well, at least pro forma, came to recognize the difficulty of reconciling permanent Israeli control over the West Bank with a political resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They also understood the corrosive effect of that unresolved conflict on Israel: the widening chasm between the pro-settlement right, especially those for whom ensuring our hold over the Land of Israel was an unarguable divine mission; and those who would choose the unity of the people of Israel over the drive to settle every inch of the land. Why did I believe that Bibi might have understood this? I’ve heard him say so, in so many words, in our conversations over the years. Yet maybe he didn’t mean it. Certainly, his words have not been borne out by action. On the policy litmus that divides those Israelis who aspire to some form of political resolution with the Palestinians from those who don’t—the hundred-or-so isolated settlements in Judaea and Samaria intended to prevent any realistic prospect of a Palestinian state and ensure open-ended Israeli control of the entirety of the territory—Netanyahu has sided with the pro-settlement religious nationalists.
I’m not sure how much of this has to do with ideology. I suspect it’s primarily a political judgment, motivated by an overarching determination simply to hold on to office. What began as a “Fortress Israel” approach during the years I spent in his government became, in the years after 2015, more like Fortress Bibi. In his mind, he was not just prime minister. He was the embodiment and existential defender of the state, standing alone and defiant against an array of purported “enemies” near and far. At home, the favored targets were rival politicians, “leftists,” the media, academia, the courts, human-rights groups—and, of course, the Arabs. Abroad, the ire and invective were often aimed at genuine adversaries, like Hamas and Hizbollah, Syria and Iran. But also, until the day Barack Obama left the Oval Office, at the president of Israel’s most important foreign ally.
With the accession of Donald Trump, the official line was that all would now be well with the Americans, because they had a president with whom Israel’s prime minister was on good terms, both personally and politically. Yet the fabric of our decades-old alliance has rested not just on a single president. It has relied on deeper bonds: with both major political parties, the American public, and institutions like the US military and the national security community. Bibi’s willingness to trample on long-accepted norms of engagement with the United States during the Obama administration could not help but have longer-term ramifications.
The effect became clear in his handling of the nuclear deal with Iran. To my dismay, no less than Bibi’s, President Obama ultimately decided against the use of America’s own military option to prevent the Iranians from going nuclear. The Americans and their international partners secured a negotiated agreement to limit key aspects of the nuclear program for between ten and twelve years. I felt it was a bad deal at the time, and still do. It conferred international recognition on Iran as a major regional power, without constraining its development of missiles, or its support of terror. It also left open the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that Iran will resume its move to become a nuclear weapons state when the deal runs out, or even before. Still, as the details of the agreement began to become clear in 2015, its provisions to curb Iran’s nuclear program did appear, at least on paper, more comprehensive and effectively policed than I had expected.
When it was announced, Israel faced the question of how to respond. Even had Labor been in power—even if I’d been prime minister—there would have been an obvious need to register our concern about a deal that relied on the compliance of an Iranian regime openly hostile to Israel and actively supporting Hizbollah and Hamas. But since the US administration already knew of these reservations, the real imperative was to use the political leverage this gave us to reach new understandings on how we could safeguard ourselves against the possibility of a nuclear Iran. We needed to reach agreement with the Americans about what kind of military strike we, or they, might have to take if the Iranians again moved to get nuclear weapons. With the approaching renewal of the ten-year agreement on American military and security aid to Israel, it was also essential to ensure that the continuing possibility of an Iranian nuclear threat was fully taken into account.
What Bibi did instead was astonishing. There was obviously no possibility that the US administration, having finally hammered out the terms of the Iran deal, was going to abandon it. Yet he chose to place himself in unprecedented, open, public opposition to President Obama. With the support of his Republican Party friends—and without the prior knowledge of the administration—he was invited to address a joint session of Congress. He used his speech to attack the Iran agreement as posing the risk of Armageddon for Israel, the Middle East, and America itself. Obama and those around him were predictably furious at this act of political grandstanding by the leader of their closest ally in the region. Nor did it escape their notice that the address to Congress came only weeks before Israel’s March 2015 election.
The stunt carried a real price for our security. A few months later, the renewal of the military aid package was announced: a total of some $38 billion over ten years. That sounded like an enormous sum, and it was. But in real terms, it wasn’t any more than the amount we were already receiving, taking into account the additional help that Congress, at the urging of the Obama administration, had provided for Israel’s missile defense programs. From my continuing contacts with high-level Americans, it was clear that without the deep tension in the administration’s relationship with the “Republican senator from Rechavia,” the package could have been worth up to an additional seven billion dollars.
Still, it played brilliantly with the constituency Bibi clearly valued most: his religious-nationalist, pro-settlement allies at home. So did another example, not long afterward, of what I suppose can be called his “Alt Zionism.” He backed out of a meticulously negotiated arrangement to set aside a small area at the Western Wall in Jerusalem where men and women could pray together, something that is anathema to the strictly Orthodox but of importance to millions of Conservative, Reform, and Progressive Jews in the United States. That decision, like Bibi’s embrace of the one-state “solution” for the West Bank, spoke volumes about his elevation of short-term politics above serious policy considerations. We have always held up Israel as a state not just for those who live there, but for those in the diaspora for whom it is a powerful symbol, and those who might one day become Israelis themselves. Now, we were in effect telling the non-Orthodox majority of American Jews, the largest and most important diaspora community, that they could not pray according to their own traditions at the holiest site in Judaism.
* * *
Still, to paraphrase the words of Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, I remain firmly convinced that there are reasons not to lose hope.
One of the unexpected pleasures of having spent the last few years working on this book is that I’ve found myself retracing not just my own life but Israel’s, step by step, since our shared infancy. I realize that a cemetery will seem an odd place to find reason for confidence in Israel’s future. But a few months ago, on one of my visits to Mishmar Hasharon, I took a walk through the little graveyard at the edge of the kibbutz where I was born and lived until I left for the army as a teenager. Stopping in front of the rows of gravestones, I was reminded of the extraordinary assortment of young men and women drawn together in the early years of the kibbutz by the shared purpose of Zionism. By a shared dream, really, since none of them could be sure it would happen. I thought of how they persevered, and of the immense sacrifices many of them made. The tombstones told the story: of my own mother and father; the parents of my kibbutz schoolmates; Bina, the metapelet, or kibbutz caregiver, who looked after us in our early years; my schoolteachers. And a reminder of the ultimate sacrifice: a dozen childhood friends and neighbors who lost their own lives, or their children’s, in defense of Israel on the battlefield.
My mind went back to two memories of my father. The first was from a few weeks after my fourth birthday, in the spring of 1946, when the state was yet to be born and Holocaust survivors were being smuggled past the British authorities into Palestine. Many came in through a cove a few miles from Mishmar Hasharon. Though almost all of them were moved on to other towns or settlements further inland, a few stayed on in our kibbutz. One was a woman named Anka. To my eyes, she looked gaunt and frail and quite old, although she was barely thirty at the time. For the first couple of weeks she was with us, I took little notice of her. Without being told what she or the others had endured, even the youngest of us somehow knew it would be wrong to stare. But gradually, I became aware of something odd. After each evening meal, she would take an entire loaf of bread, tuck it into the folds of her ill-fitting kibbutz clothing, and hurry back to her room. I couldn’t understand it. There were shortages of many things on the kibbutz. But at its center, near the communal dining hall, was our bakery, which served not just us but the whole area for miles around. We always had bread. Finally, I asked my father why she was doing it. He turned very serious when he answered. He didn’t want to lie to me, but he could find no words to describe the Nazis’ slaughter of millions of Jewish men, women, and children to a son so young. Crouching down to my level, he said quietly, “Ehud, with what this young woman has gone through in her life before she came here, she can never be sure there will be bread tomorrow.”
The other memory was from nearly a decade later. The occasion was my bar mitzvah, the Jewish rite of passage for boys when they reach the age of thirteen. Mishmar Hasharon, like other kibbutzim, was not only nonobservant. We were ideologically nonreligious. Yet our whole school class, boys and girls, gathered in front of the children’s home for a group ceremony, as our parents and the other grown-ups looked on with pride. Given the age range among us, I was one of the nearest to my actual bar mitzvah date. The traditional entry into adulthood for girls in Judaism comes a year earlier than for boys, at age twelve, and several of the girls were not far short of turning fourteen. The girls wore blue skirts. We wore white dress shirts and dark blue trousers. One of the girls gave a short speech on behalf of us all, saying how we hoped to put what we had experienced and been taught as children to the service of the kibbutz, and of Israel.
Then came, for me, the most memorable part. My father, usually so reticent in public, had been chosen to deliver a few words on behalf of all of the parents.
“Dearest children,” he said, “our hearts are too narrow to contain all the feelings of mothers and fathers on this celebration of reaching the age of mitzvot”—the Hebrew word for the 613 obligations in the life of a religious Jew. “Only yesterday we stood by your cots, gazing in wonder at the renewal of creation, and looking, dumbfounded, upon beaming babies’ faces, gripped by tingling anticipation and nervous joy … And suddenly you have sprouted and become grown people!”
The world, he said, had not welcomed our arrival “with cries of joy, or shouts of ‘hooray!’ You were brought into the world under leaden skies, in the shadow of the horrors of the Holocaust. Our brothers in European lands were subjected to desolation and destruction, and the threat of devastation also loomed over those of our nation dwelling in Zion. In those dark days, we saw in the light of your eyes a ray of hope that the sun would shine again.” He went on to talk about the 1948 war, when “a mighty wave burst our borders” and threatened to “wipe away the hope” of a Jewish future in Israel. And how it was only the steadfastness and courage of mere children, not that much older than us, who had kept that from happening: “a generation with the morning dew still in their eyelashes, and childhood laughter still in their mouths, who carried the nation’s fate on their backs.”
That, he said, was the soil into which we had been planted. And yet, somehow, it had brought forth fruit. “The morning of your lives did not cloud over. Nor was the sunshine dimmed. You have grown older, taller, like new saplings before the arrival of summer.” Now, he said, it would fall upon us to write the next chapter in our country’s story. The Jewish people’s story as well, as he made clear by how he ended his speech. He did not quote from Theodor Herzl, the founding inspiration for the Zionist movement, or Ben-Gurion. Instead he ended with a prayer, albeit with touches of the kibbutz sprinkled in as well. “Please, God,” he said, “prepare their steps as they walk forward so that they do not stumble or fall. For they are still soft and delicate. Give their hands strength to carry the burden of generations on these promised shores. And give understanding in their hearts, so that they gain knowledge and wisdom, handicraft and practical skills, to complete the work we have started, and to achieve what we have not managed to do.” Finally, he said, “awaken in them, from above, the spirit of yearning for the glory of mankind, just as rain drips from heaven into the furrows of the thirsty fields.”
Recording his words now in writing, six decades later, I know I have every one of them right. That’s because I still have the copy, in his own neat Hebrew script, which he gave me as a gift that evening. At the top, he wrote: “Welcome speech from the parents, at the bar mitzvah for Ehud’s class.” Then, above the words of the speech itself: “For you, my son. With lots of love.”
* * *
It is not just nostalgia that brings me back to these memories. It is because they so powerfully capture what motivated early Zionism and the early Zionists—and how far our government’s Alt Zionism has moved away from what they stood for and sacrificed for. In the Palestinians’ eyes, Mishmar Hasharon was probably a Jewish settlement not that different from those Arik began planting throughout the West Bank in the late 1970s. But for the settlers of my parents’ generation, the ultimate aim was not to secure every inch of the Land of Israel: it was to redeem, reinvigorate, and rededicate themselves to the People of Israel. Today’s settlement ideologues would argue that they, too, are pioneers, seeking to establish and defend what they view as the basic security of the state. Yet that’s not true, certainly of the dozens of fairly isolated settlements they’ve established deep in Judaea and Samaria.
The real drive for these settlers is a sense of divine mission. Nor are they shy in contrasting themselves with the early Zionists, so many of whom were not religiously observant. In fact, some of them insinuate that the early settlers were not really, fully, truly Jews. Yet my father’s bar mitzvah speech encapsulated the sense in which he and almost every other adult I grew up with remained in touch with their Jewishness, their history, their traditions. When we entered high school, we also studied a range of Jewish texts, especially the supreme source of Torah commentary and religious legal tradition, the Talmud. I can still remember one of our teachers quoting a phrase used over the centuries by some of our greatest sages: that there are “seventy faces” to the Torah. In other words, our scripture invites multiple interpretations, often contradictory, yet all valuable—a precept central to the vitality, and the argumentativeness “for the sake of God,” that have always underpinned Judaism. It also reflects the inherent modesty, the openness to other views and insights that the elder Rav Kook brought to early religious Zionism. It is that, above all, that our unprecedentedly right-wing government appears to have lost.
What I firmly believe has not been lost is the power of Zionism itself: the unlikely story of how Israel was born, how we survived, and, even against the toughest of challenges, emerged not just stronger in military terms, but more resilient, vibrant, and renewed. For me, never has the arc of our history been so vivid, or felt so personal, than at an event I attended in the spring of 2001. It was only a few days before I left office as prime minister. It was a graduation ceremony, to honor the air force’s latest group of fighter pilots. As it got under way, I watched the cadets who would soon get their wings march in and take their places. Including, I noticed, a young woman with a ponytail. We had no female fighter pilots at the time, so I asked one of the air force commanders who she was. “Her name is Roni Zuckerman,” he said. “She’s an ace. One of the top five in the entire class. She’ll be commissioned as an F-16 pilot in another three months.” And he added: “She’s from Lohamei HaGetaot.” In English, the phrase means “ghetto fighters.” It’s the name of a kibbutz in northern Israel, founded a year after the state by Holocaust survivors, including some of the few young resistance fighters who lived to fight on after the Nazi SS moved in on the eve of Passover 1943 and began killing the remaining Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and burning it down, block by block. I knew, without having to ask, who young Roni’s grandparents must be: Antek Zuckerman and Tzivia Lubetkin. All Israelis knew of them. They were commanders of one of the main Jewish resistance groups. Tzivia was one of the leaders of the ghetto uprising, while Antek was leading the effort to smuggle in weapons before the Nazis’ final assault. A year later, they led some 300 survivors from the ghetto in a further Warsaw uprising against the Germans.
As I watched Roni take her place with the other cadets, I felt tears well up in my eyes. My own grandparents had perished inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Now, I was prime minister and defense minister of a strong, sovereign Israel of which they could not even have dreamed. And I had the privilege of seeing the granddaughter of two of the leaders of the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis take her place as a fighter pilot among the elite defenders of our state.
Seventeen years have passed since that moment when tears welled up in my eyes on the air force dais. In those years, the State of Israel has continued to grow stronger economically and militarily. During this period, I served as defense minister in two governments. We overcame the second intifada, brought quiet to our northern border, and triumphed over most of the threats that had menaced us in the past. Many of our enemies have become weaker; others have become covert allies. At the same time, Israel has grown prosperous, world-renowned for its leading-edge technologies. And yet during those years, the one-state process has also advanced, almost unimpeded, and is now nearing the point of no return.
Today, we must return to the dream that allowed Antek Zuckerman and Tzivia Lubetkin to survive the inferno of the Warsaw Ghetto and build a Jewish democratic state in the land of our forefathers. Today, my generation must say to our children and grandchildren the very same words that my father said to me on my bar mitzvah. And we must work together with Roni Zuckerman and her generation, so that Israel can continue to enjoy not only air supremacy, but also a deep sense of moral clarity, Jewish purpose, and universal mission. The threats we face may have changed enormously over the last seventy years, but the challenge has remained the same: to defend our lives, preserve our heritage, and uphold Israel as a model nation.
There is a quote, from Herzl, that has been repeated by so many Israeli and Jewish leaders over the past seven decades that I fear it has become a cliché. That doesn’t make it any less true, however, nor less relevant to the critically important fight now under way to ensure that Israel has a strong, secure, democratic, and prosperous future.
“If you will it,” Herzl said, “it is not a dream.”