Reflecting on a sense of resignation among some Israelis and Diaspora Jews, Kibbutz Nir Am resident Sam Shube argues that democracy is neither a bedrock certainty nor a lost paradise, but a prize to be won in a protracted struggle at shifting points of conflict within Israeli society and culture, adding that defeatism is beyond the range of his available options.
We leave our phones at the door so the brigade commander in charge of northern Gaza can debrief us. He proceeds to survey IDF deployment between the perimeter fence of our kibbutz and the ‘yellow line,’ seven kilometres inside the Gaza Strip, where Israeli occupation ends and the Hamas gangster state begins. This was my third such meeting since October 7, 2023. The first was emotionally supercharged, as an IDF major-general reviewed tactical findings about the battle for Nir Am, illustrating his point on a map with a dense web of arrows and circles. People who lost children or siblings in the Hamas attack were unable to contain their anger, and the hapless officer was reduced to declarations of contrition and confessions of failure (a refrain echoed by every senior military and intelligence official but not, tellingly, by the government).
The second time, it was an airforce representative who deftly explained – Hamas crippled our command and control, he said – why Israel’s vaunted fighter squadrons and helicopter gunships were nowhere to be seen while families were being murdered in their homes. Some sixty heavily armed terrorists were held at bay for hours in our chicken hatchery by armed kibbutz volunteers and a handful of police and infantrymen. But two of the latter were killed in the fighting, when a single Hellfire missile could have solved the problem in a flash. In fact Nir Am was lucky compared to kibbutzim like Nir Oz, where a third of the population was massacred or taken hostage.
Today, in any event, the atmosphere was more business-like. This young, battle-hardened colonel – in his early 30’s at most – was recently given command of assets and manpower on a scale few civilians manage in their entire lifetimes. An assault rifle slung over his olive-drab, Zelenskyy-style T-shirt, he humbles me with his confidence and sense of mission. After three years of non-stop war and a government campaign to eviscerate democracy, I still find his idealism and ethos of service a source of inspiration.
If the truth be told, however, the relentless grind of events has taken its toll. Calcalist, an Israeli newspaper, reports that emigration from Israel has quadrupled under the current, far-right government. Of those leaving, the proportion of married families has increased, as has the share of émigrés holding academic degrees. This is bad news for Israel’s economy, as it will be, one may assume, for liberal-leaning political parties on election day. Conservative pundit Gadi Taub divides Israeli society into two classes. On the one hand a mobile, left-leaning, Seinfeld-watching, broadly secular elite who boast higher education, English language proficiency, and the option of relocating overseas; on the other hand a right-leaning traditionalist majority, deeply rooted in Israeli society both economically and emotionally, with fewer opportunities and less inclination to leave. The mobiles, as Taub opines, may be detached cosmopolitans, or they may be patriots deeply committed to a vision of Israel under threat from an authoritarian juggernaut. According to one report, the majority of the opponents of government’s judicial coup have experienced an intense mental reaction that demands clinical attention. Either way, it smacks of defeatism.
A similar sense of resignation is taking hold in the diaspora. Writing in ARC, Shaul Magid argues that the ‘world-historical catastrophe that is October 7th and the destruction of Gaza’ has undermined liberal Zionism itself, with ‘young American Jews . . . questioning the entire Zionist project.’ This may be borne out by the large share of New York Jews who voted for Zohran Mamdani, despite his hostile record of anti-Israel screed and paranoid conspiracy mongering that predates the Gaza war [my characterisation S.S]. Magid concludes that ‘there is now Judaism and Zionism before Gaza or after Gaza’ and that ‘we cannot move forward until there is a collective reckoning.’
Ben Gurion University President Danny Chamovitz has a different take. ‘October 7th should have been clarifying. The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust; surging antisemitism on campuses and streets. And yet, an increasing number of Jews seemed more unsettled by Israel’s response than by the massacre itself, or even the justification of the Hamas onslaught.’ Faced with the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, writes Chamowitz, American Jews have decided to ‘accommodate, rationalize, and choose social acceptance.’
Where you stand, of course, depends on where you sit, and Magid’s Hegelian musings about this war being ‘world historical’ seat me firmly in the Chamowitz camp. Gaza was a watershed in many ways, but to classify it alongside the battle of Austerlitz, the crossing of the Rubicon or the defeat of the Persian empire is to fall off the deep end of the Zeitgeist. I, too, am distraught by the loss of 70,000 Gazan lives – terrorists and noncombatants alike; angry at the removal of safeguards against civilian casualties that guided the IDF in previous wars; aghast by Israel’s gratuitous blockade on food supplies between March and July of 2025, dumbfounded by the morally warped proclamations of our leaders.
But let us be clear. Mass civilian casualties were hard wired into the Hamas’ war strategy. Their 500 kilometres of concrete-reinforced underground tunnels – potentially the world’s biggest civil defence infrastructure – were off limits to innocent Gazans. As Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk shamelessly explained, the tunnels were dug for military use. Civilians, he said, are the UN’s problem. As for Israel, the only possible response to October 7th was an overwhelming and destructive use of force. Since every life is sacred, how many casualties should be deemed unacceptable? ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden was excoriated for his complicity in Israeli crimes even before the count reached 10,000. In fact, genocide has been a feeble-minded description of Israeli policy for a generation. In 2006, Electronic Intifada matter-of-factly explained that a ‘genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning…another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun.’ In 2009 Hugo Chavez elaborated that ‘the question is not whether the Israelis want to exterminate the Palestinians. They’re doing it openly.’ And a 2014 report by the self-styled Russell Tribunal on Palestine used the G-word on no less than 30 occasions.
To be sure, the scale this time is different. As I survey the rubble of Beit Hanoun from a hilltop near my home, I am haunted by the spectre of a city destroyed. But Zionism undermined? What other nation in modern history has lost its very existential legitimacy in a war of self-defence – or any kind of war, for that matter?
Back at the kibbutz, the colonel’s Q&A session is interrupted by my own blistering rejoinder to one listener’s comment that crossed the boundary into vulgar racism. After having paid a solidarity visit to a Bedouin village earlier in the day, I have even less tolerance than usual for vapid, self-styled patriotism. Alas, Israel’s lunatic fringe of a government has mainstreamed the brutalisation of our public discourse. I know I’m fighting an uphill battle. In this dark age of Trump and Netanyahu, democracy is neither a bedrock certainty nor a lost paradise but a prize to be won in a protracted struggle at shifting points of conflict within our society and culture.
For me, defeatism is beyond the range of my available options. Neither my partner nor my son possess another passport. And while I confess an addiction to Seinfeld reruns and an abiding faith in liberal democracy, I am far from mobile, being too deeply rooted in my own corner of this land and its people. Palestinians have a word for their own, tenacious clinging to the land: sumud. This is my sumud. My son will grow to maturity, neither in metropolitan Berlin nor in suburban New Jersey, but on the war-scarred geopolitical limen between Sderot and Beit Hanoun, a Jew and a democrat, despite it all.
