Israel and the trials of liberal solidarity Pre-war tensions are returning

Quite apart from the academic evidence — James Davison Hunter is just one of the scholars to persuasively detail just how depleted American democratic solidarity has become — how could it be otherwise? Isn’t liberalism about individual freedom, even as solidarity involves committing to the other? Doesn’t liberalism take shape around carefully defined rights, while solidarity grows out of deeply subjective feelings? 

Not really. As the Hebrew University political theorist Charles Lesch has explained, liberal societies cannot survive without solidarity. Solidarity helps me see beyond ideology and self-interest. It fosters the empathy and fairness that make me want to ensure others find justice. It saves me from potential tyrannies of family and community by seeing us all as connected. And solidarity helps me develop my own moral self: it isn’t always about me.

Why, then, do liberal societies have such a hard time grounding their solidarity? Hunter calls for new religiously grounded ideas of hope. To Lesch’s mind, the problem runs even deeper than that: foundational liberal thinkers, from Rousseau to Kant to Habermas, committed to emancipation from traditional religious authority and its many injustices, based themselves on metaphysical ideas of morality that they can’t justify on their own philosophical terms. Abstract ideas like the “general will” or “social contract” or “public reason”— none can spark the lasting social solidarity that pushes us beyond ourselves to the point of sacrifice. None can quite fill the hole left by the pre-modern rootedness of solidarity in the shared humanity of God’s creation and moral laws. 

There is though no easy return to premodern certainties. Lesch’s solution is to draw on the modern Jewish humanist tradition. One lodestar is Emmanuel Levinas. He said that caring for other people, as unknowable as God, is the only way out of an endless, hopeless struggle for power. Martin Buber makes a similar point. Our political and social institutions are shallow human artefacts, working to reflect, but never truly enacting, God’s own standards of justice. Only by relating to others as living, breathing people can we truly live together in the world. It’s by caring for others, in short, that we come to understand our own strengths, and our vulnerabilities too. Solidarity, then, is not just blind loyalty or homogeneity. Rather, it’s a way of life, lived under moral ideals. 

All this was put to the test on October 7. That day, the Israeli state and its institutions failed its people miserably. Yet society pulled together, displaying solidarity at its most profound. How? Two new books offer some insight here, not only into what happened, but what made it possible. 

One Day in October gathers 40 stories of heroism, resourcefulness and self-sacrifice. The editors, Oriya Mevorach and Yair Agmon, took care not to homogenise their examples: we hear the different cadences of troops and civilians, religious and secularists, Arabs and Jews, all featuring in one belief-beggaring, heartbreaking story after another. Taken together it is an unforgettable tapestry of goodness in the very teeth of shocking suffering. Some are first-person tales, others told by those who survive them.  

The ex-Orthodox anarchist who caught and then tossed back seven Hamas grenades before being killed by the eighth; the young father who ran out bare-handed to fight the attackers; the medic who refused to be evacuated so she could stay with the wounded; the eight-year-old girl who refused to be freed if her friend wasn’t saved alongside her; the Bedouin who drove his minivan back and forth under fire to rescue people from harm’s way; the grandfather who, after putting his family in a safe room, sat in his lounge and convinced the terrorists that he was alone, and that only he needed to die — Mevorach and Agmon tell story after story of parents sacrificing themselves for their children, raw conscripts fighting to the death, of civilians rushing into slaughter, never to return. 

Yet not even this epic heroism withstands an overwhelming sense of loss. One member of Zaka, a volunteer ambulance and remains-retrieval organisation composed entirely of Ultraorthodox Haredim, describes the silent dialogues he and his colleagues held with burned, mangled, maimed corpses, promising to keep their dignity even in death, and hearing the dead say “your eyes will be our mouths” in return. 

The heroism here, then, is not triumphal. It’s wrenched from the absurd. A father of two soldiers reflects on how both fought at the same base that day, independent of one another, one dying and saving his brother without even knowing he was there. “So if you want to ask questions,” the father says, “ask, but ask all the questions.” 

Amir Tibon takes a different approach. In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, he tells a story at once more sweeping and finely scaled. A Haaretz writer and editor, he powerfully tells the heart-stopping story of one family on one kibbutz — his own — interweaving it with the larger history that brought them to that morning in October.

That kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the border with Gaza, was founded in the earliest days of the Israeli state. It grew, with time, into a strangely Israeli Eden: a close-knit community with echoes of democratic socialism, set in beautiful surroundings with a rich cultural life, regularly at the receiving end of mortar attacks and rocket-propelled grenades. The latter became a regular fact of life after Israel’s clumsy withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, aided and abetted by American misjudgments and the Palestinian Authority’s fecklessness, that ultimately led to Hamas’ seizure of power two years later. 

A crucial point of Tibon’s account, and one too often lost in standard press accounts, is the extent to which the communities abutting Gaza were filled with Left-leaning Israelis, who, when seeking affordable housing, chose to live in the country’s far but unquestionably sovereign periphery — rather than the occupied West Bank. They saw themselves as, and often actually were, the descendants of the Left-Labour idealists of Ben-Gurion’s age. Many moved near Gaza precisely to foster Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, and help local Palestinians as best they could, all as committed Zionists fulfilling their democratic principles. 

Tibon very much exemplifies that ethos of Left-Zionist solidarity, which he learned from his father, a retired major general. Like so many others, the elder Tibon grabbed his pistol on October 7 and literally fought his way south, standing alongside soldiers decades younger than himself. Unlike many others, he succeeded in his mission, rescuing his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren from their dark and suffocating shelter.  

The betrayal of Tibon’s title is that of the Israeli government, and in particular of Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tibon’s criticisms of Netanyahu are as deep as the commitment to the Jewish and democratic ethos on which he has staked his life. Netanyahu has built his career on a mix of hardline nationalism delivered in eloquent cadences, and brilliant, if infuriating, tactical manoeuvres. Both are aimed at the same goal: ensuring Israel’s immediate physical and economic security while kicking strategic decisions down the road forever. One such manoeuvre involved facilitating the bounteous flow of Qatari cash to Hamas, so that it’d never need to cede control over Gaza to its internationally recognised rivals in the Palestinian Authority.

Not, of course, that Netanyahu was alone here. Many Israelis convinced themselves that Gaza could be contained. As we now see, the price of confrontation was just too frightful to contemplate. 

And, in fact, even if the Hamas attacks had never happened, 2023 would still have gone down in Israeli history for the massive anti-Netanyahu protests that rocked the country last year in response to his programme to roll back Israel’s judiciary. Those rallies galvanised Israeli civil society in ways not seen for decades. And it was, in part, those very same protest movements that pivoted and turned to the other in those awful post-October 7 days. 

The week before the attack, we held dialogue sessions around the country, making an effort to reach across Israel’s bitter political divide. One thing that clearly emerged in those conversations was tremendous solidarity at the grassroots, thinning out the further we got from on-the-ground problems, and the faster we approached the broader ideological chasms dividing society. No wonder the philosopher Hanoch Ben-Pazi has claimed there now exists a “truly incomprehensible” gap between Israelis and their leaders.

As the war grinds on, much of the intense solidarity of its early days has ebbed. A very real flash point is whether the ultimate war aim is crushing the terrorists or returning the captive hostages and displaced communities to their homes. Another, perhaps inevitably, is what you think of Netanyahu. Much of the Israeli public wishes him gone. Yet his hardline coalition partners know that they have nowhere else to go, and his partisan supporters attack his critics verbally and sometimes physically. The miracle of Israeli solidarity, then, is being put to the test anew.

While neither One Day nor The Gates is about solidarity as such, the idea infuses the pages of both. What, then, makes it happen, and keeps it going? The basic structures of daily life are surely important here: public schools; state-funded nurseries and other family-friendly policies; national health and social insurance; and, of course, mandatory military service with reserve duty later. While Israel is a far more privatised society than before, in short, much of the strong collectivist ethos of its first decades endures. 

Yet more than the socio-economics, Israel is a state with thick webbings of culture, attachment to place and family, and the Hebrew language, whose renewal as a living, spoken language is itself a kind of miracle. 

Judaism, of course, isn’t the only faith here. Nor is Jewishness the only ethnicity. Yet one striking feature of the civilian response to October 7 was the engagement of Israel’s Arab citizens, Christians and Muslims both. Their own entwinements with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank torque their complicated lives all the more. As Rima Farah, a scholar of Israeli Christian history has pointed out, those particular dilemmas offer the most acute test of whether Israeliness, as opposed to Jewishness, can really be a national identity. 

Here as elsewhere, and for all its uniqueness, Israel is also a testing ground for key problems of democracy. Israel is not the apartheid state of caricature — yet the fear that occupation of the West Bank will make it one is much of what drives Tibon and other liberal activists. Resolution of that occupation now seems more distant than ever, and lazy talk of “two states” is wishful thinking. Yet some meaningful path away from the endless grind of military oppression and settler expropriation is key to a decent future. And as October 7 hinted, for just a moment, that future is partly built on solidarity, on people rushing to help their fellow humans without stopping to think of which party they voted for or which language they use at home. More than that, it allows us to honestly ask both ourselves and each other: where did we go wrong?

Once religion ceases to be party political, it can become a way to ground our ties and moral responsibilities to the past, to the future, and to each other. Fortunately, for many Israelis, their faith isn’t merely a matter of spiritual dispensation — but rather a way of anchoring one’s own particular identity in something larger, something which endures once we’re gone. In that way, it is not unlike the caressing solidarities of family. At the same time, and as Levinas and Buber clearly understood, religion hangs an eternal question mark over all our certainties, and all our worldly ambitions, cautioning us against overweening pride, and undercutting the grounds of our cruelty. It makes us at once deeply particular and deeply universal, utterly encased in our particular circumstances and yet entwined with all human beings everywhere, sharing as we do the distinctly human mix of ringing potency and utter vulnerability. It makes possible a kind of solidarity in which we can offer help to others beyond ourselves, without losing ourselves in the process. 

That balance is always there, but it withers and contorts without a welcoming echo. Solidarity is not all sweetness and light. There are solidarities of hatred, enmity, fanaticism and violence, as the last year has terribly shown. But that cautionary knowledge can also guard us from ourselves, guiding us from the seductive lies of “leadership” and towards the tangible, life-giving work of responsibility. 

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Yehudah Mirsky served in the US State Department’s human rights bureau, is a professor at Brandeis University, a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his books is Rav Kook: Mystic In A Time Of Revolution (Yale University Press).

YehudahMirsky