“Together We Win?”
Over the years between 1988 and 2012, I was a regular traveler to Israel, spending months at a time in Jerusalem, where I hoped someday to live. In 2012, my husband and three children and I spent a sabbatical year in Israel, seriously considering Aliyah. At the time, I had a strong sense that I had served in my capacity as a teacher and scholar in American institutions long enough and that I wanted to take what I could offer to my other identity-place: Israel, a home among Jews, where the Jewish future seemed to me more vibrant than in the United States. My Zionism was a love of the land of Israel, the Hebrew language, Hebrew culture (music, literature, theater), the study of Torah in Hebrew, and the cultural support for those who chose to observe Jewish commandments as a way of life.
In 2012, a turbulent year in Israel that included an eight-day war in Gaza and an early election won by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, I began to see that a critical project for Jews in Israel, however, was to make a Jewish state a more fully democratic one. I had been working on ideas of democracy and education in the United States—through teaching the reading, writing, and sharing of life stories. These interests had arisen out of my research and teaching of American slavery, and my research and teaching of emergent literacy practices while teaching at a Jewish day school deeply concerned with helping students develop an ethical Jewish life. Making Aliyah at age 42 would be making Aliyah as a pretty seasoned professor in the humanities; as I saw it, that brought with it social responsibilities. But first I would need to learn the new terrain.
It was teaching Palestinian students (citizens of Israel, most of whom lived in the north of the country) that first awakened me to how little I had thought about the paradox of democracy in a state defined as Jewish. How could the state of Israel survive as genuinely democratic—committed to upholding the equality of all of its citizens—and also Jewish?
Today, eleven years after I made Aliyah, and after the crises of October 7 and its ensuing war, the problem of a Jewish democracy is far sharper for me.
Being both American and now Israeli, I can also see how differently the last two years have registered for those Jewish leftists committed to democracy, in both countries. For American Jews, the crisis has been twofold. First, the sense of abandonment by political allies both in registering the horrific losses of October and affirming the right of Israel to exist and defend itself. Second, the simultaneous need to disavow the statements and actions of Israel’s ruling coalition and its wartime policies in Gaza.
Meanwhile, for leftist Israeli Jews like myself, the widespread, intense personal losses of October 7 and its war have brought me to a new clarity: a Jewish and democratic Israel can be brought about only by the ceaseless work of a political resistance. How strange to have moved to the Jewish state in order to protest its policies and its leadership! How strange to feel that my friends and colleagues and I must fight against the state in order to preserve its Jewish ethics—in warfare, in social policy, in rhetoric—and its democratic commitment to equality and dignity for all its citizens, Jewish and Arab. Over three long and painful years, I have come to feel that protest culture—against my own home, the Jewish state to which I immigrated, filled with longing and hope—is the truest reflection of my love for Israel. I am far from alone.
From life in the political opposition in Israel, here are a few examples: In Israel, days after October 7, the public sphere became dominated by a single slogan: Yahad N’ natzeach, together we will win. It was printed on the milk cartons and the containers of eggs, on supermarket receipts, paper coffee cups, billboards, and the digital display of every single Egged bus, once the buses returned to service.
L’ natzeach is more than to win. L’ natzeach is to be victorious- נ.צ.ח ,over (it can also mean to conduct an orchestra) and its root means nothing less than“ eternity.” From the writings of HaRav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook, the visionary of religious Zionism, came the emphasis on Israel as “am ha-netzach,” the eternal people, for whom redemption may tarry, though it will certainly come.
But in the way that Hebrew works, its roots holding the ancient and the religious consciousness within the contemporary and the secular formulation, the “we will win” remained more than a worldly conquest. It also held,“to be victorious.”
To be victorious is not simply to survive, but to triumph over the others whose stamina, faith, and values will ultimately fall short, however long this may take. While this phrase is so commonly known among Israelis that it has become a cliché, something you hear without hearing, I cannot help but note nearly every time I hear it that this sentiment is not unique to Jews. What is the multifaceted concept of sumud, resistance, to our Palestinian neighbors, if not the belief that they can wait out all history, endure and endure, without capitulating to their enemy? And what did “ yachad”— together—mean?
How often unity seemed to mean that people on the left needed to abandon their ethical commitments, to capitulate to the ruling power, the evil animal, on behalf of social coherence. Come on over, maybe just for now, maybe because it’ s an emergency, maybe because to be tolerant means to tolerate the intolerant, but “ unity ” almost never seemed to mean people who disagreed with me coming over to my side. Even more sneaky than the “ ” we, and more misleading than the “together, ” was the language of victory. I could not see how victory was in the equation. We had lost. “Nitzahon ” was denial in its most offensive form. A strategic obfuscation to avoid responsibility for what immediately came to be described as the“mehdal,” the massive, systemic failure, neglect, lack.
Twelve hundred Israelis were murdered while the army struggled even to grasp the scale of attack, let alone respond to it; 3000 terrorists and countless Gazans had simply dismantled and broken through a supposedly failsafe barrier and captured tanks, police stations, kibbutzim, main roads, electronics, cars, bicycles, goods, and people. Tens of thousands of Israelis were now evacuated to live in hotel rooms for the foreseeable future. We had untended lands and animals, orphans and sole survivors. And a war was beginning that would take its own toll in the lives of soldiers (to date 1152). Within a month, I had been to multiple funerals of soldiers who had been killed in combat, friends of my children and children of my friends.
“Together,“ ”we,“ ” win. ”
I wondered if there was a feminist out there who wouldn’t be skeptical of the elements of this slogan. For years, I had been a member of a feminist activist WhatsApp group made up of approximately 90 Israelis, almost all women: legal scholars, educators, physical, mental, and public health experts, journalists, historians, artists, scholars of Jewish text and culture, storytellers, social workers, entrepreneurs, at least one venture capitalist, one orchestra conductor, one neuroscientist, and one urban geographer, and leaders of NGOs of all sorts. This group, organized by Prof. Yofi Tirosh, the leading legal activist against the segregation of men and women in the Israeli public sphere, collectively provided and produced a running commentary and challenge to the mainstream news. I had known Yofi for almost 25 years. Her group constituted not only a space of critique, but also of trying out ideas, of argument, of shared chagrin, of building initiatives, of resistance to patriarchy and militarism, of mutual support across differences of ethnicity and religious identification. It was focused and businesslike (not a catch-all for politics more generally), and it educated me about Israeli feminist activism.
“Together, we will win,” was roundly rejected by the group as coercive doublespeak. To give license to a prolonged war, fought with terribly compromised ethics and only a secondary commitment to rescuing the Israeli hostages who had been abandoned by the state and the military on October 7, and then every single day since October 7 that they remained in Gaza.“We can heal, ” one participant suggested simply. Her slogan bore hope, with the recognition of real pain. Not least, the pain of the endless fight for women to be admitted to the circles of decision-making that determine the course of daily life, and drove policy for the war that had just begun. Where were women on the security council? On the negotiating teams for the release of the hostages? Why were the voices of the female tech experts and information scientists heading up the volunteer war-rooms in the expo center in Tel Aviv not the face of the state? Why was the face of the state and the military exclusively male? Why were the strongest ethical voices in the state the voices opposing state policy?
Values and principles make demands insofar as they are animated by real life experience. Teaching Palestinian students for a decade had been my first cue that our democracy was deeply compromised. I had become more and more dumbfounded by the dilemmas and difficulties of non-Jewish residents or citizens in a democratic Israel. Who exactly were they in this schema? Inequality was becoming increasingly visible to me– the profiling at the airport, the mall, in the car at checkpoints which previously had seemed to me more like toll stations in the U.S.
When I moved to Israel as a professor of English literature, I slowly moved also from teaching Victorian studies to the field of life writing (primarily autobiography and memoir). Victorian novels were very long, complicated, and full of unfamiliar vocabulary and syntax; they also occasioned my trying to make an extremely foreign culture of the past into an intelligible field for exploration. I could see the value in that attempt, but I had limited time and my priorities had changed in this new environment and as I got to know my new students.
My syllabi in life writing were electrifying to students who had never encountered nonfiction as literature (to date, extremely few English literature students get serious experience in reading literary nonfiction), had rarely encountered perspectives on history written in first-person, and became newly curious about their own lives and those of their fellow students as we experimented with our own autobiographical writing in relation to the texts we read. I began to develop a practice for teaching life narrative with groups of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students who were entirely ignorant of each others ’ lives, collective histories, and historical wounds. We studied the genre in English from its earliest appearance to its most recent forms, across geography, gender, ethnicity, age and class, but I began to design my courses so that they always ended with at least a month of texts that were “ close to home, ” written by Jews and Palestinians from the second half of the twentieth century forward. It was teaching Palestinian students (citizens of Israel, most of whom lived in the north of the country) that first awakened me to how little I had thought about the paradox of democracy in a state defined as Jewish. How could the state of Israel survive as genuinely democratic—committed to upholding the equality of all of its citizens—and also Jewish?
One semester, when I asked students to do their own autobiographical writing, a student in a hijab wrote about how the very thought of going to the mall to buy new makeup exhausted her because she was always stopped and searched. As she read her work aloud in our classroom, I saw in an utterly new way— and I hoped other Jewish students saw—how comfortable it was to be part of the Jewish majority. Jews were my guards, and my soldiers and my policemen, in my circle, there to protect me. They identified non-Jewish others as potential threats, even if they were, like my student, residents and citizens. For me, this teaching in which Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of the state encountered each others’ experience was a way of building democratic culture, literary sensitivity, human sensitivity, curiosity, and the challenging skills of listening well, recognizing the value of silence, paying attention to another ’ s experience without immediate reference to oneself and accepting genuine, consequential disagreement about fundamental matters. My classes were little islands in which I had the power and the freedom to insist on the equality of human dignity, to the fullest possible extent, and as much equality of voice as possible, which is to say, at least the opportunity for anyone to feel they could speak, if they chose to, without being attacked or contradicted.
Again, I found myself at the nexus of democracy and education. While I had come to Israel thinking that I wanted to be part of a Jewish Israeli culture, to work within my own umbrella community, I now saw myself more as an American immigrant who had absorbed the democratic value of human equality and was in a position to share this ideal and its implications in a country where the ideal had virtually no roots. In fact, as an ethnonational state, Israel had plenty of practices and beliefs that did the opposite: that enshrined differentiated rights and benefits, as well as obligations.
I was realizing that what my Aliyah had to offer was not necessarily Jewish in its purposes and origin (though my beliefs were rooted in Jewish texts as well), but uniquely American. Often, Israelis would scoff, “Zeh lo America, ” this isn’t America, shaming olim who expected something or other to resemble their American experience. But in the years preceding 2017, and even well into the Trump presidency, I could see plenty of things about America that were worth importing, starting with the commitment to realizing the nation’ s democratic potential, a commitment many hybrid Americans had imbibed and pursued against extreme odds. I had grown up to respect difference, not to mock it. And I had grown up as a minority: a fortunate minority, but a minority. Now I was in the Jewish majority, but in the political minority with a commitment to democracy.
Ilana M. Blumberg is author of two memoirs, Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books, and Open Your Hand: Teaching as A Jew, Teaching as an American. She teaches at Bar Ilan University. This is an excerpt from an essay in progress.
