X Close

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

October 7 saw Israelis come together (Photo by Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

October 7 saw Israelis come together (Photo by Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)


October 23, 2024   8 mins

October 7 kicked Israel into terror of body and mind. The savage massacres, unfathomable in themselves; the mounting evidence of rapes, beheadings, immolations; the government’s colossal failure; the nightmare of Israelis, young and old, captive in Hamas tunnels; the foreboding of more catastrophes to come, in Israel and in Gaza; all crashing down as the list of victims grew, and sons and mothers searched frantically for loved ones they’d never see again.

Yet amid that nightmare was something miraculous. I saw friends spontaneously arrange accommodation for refugees from the south, people they’d never met. I saw a drama school, converted into a charity centre, filled with clothing, toys, books and nappies. I saw volunteers establishing makeshift schools, babysitting, offering free counselling. 

I saw solidarity: passionate, tenacious, resourceful; solidarity in a free society. Liberality in its oldest King James meaning, of unasked-for generosity, given in freedom. Today’s liberal societies encourage any number of virtues. But truth be told, solidarity is not among them. 

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.” 

“The heroism here is not triumphal. It’s wrenched from the absurd.”

Amir Tibon takes a different approach. In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal  Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, 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. 


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

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

31 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
14 days ago

“…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”

Very poetic… but also twaddle. Whose religion? Judaism? What about Islam, and Islamism? It’s one religion against another: so much for “deeply universal” fellowship, particularly by one side.

The author’s blindness to this is astonishing,

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
14 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

That merely proves you must decide which religion to believe in.

It doesn’t make a case for having no religion at all, which leads only to selfishness and social collapse, as we see in the West.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

It is totally possible to have Faith and live decently as espousedby ALL credible holy leaders, not least Jesus of Nazareth* and still eschew any and all (man-made) religions as I fo myself.
*I am a follower of the teachings of Jesus and Buddha, ie Buddhust Christian (not a religion but a Way).. there are far too many Catholics and far too many Protestants and far, far too few genuine Christians in the world..

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
13 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

Yes, because human nature is weak and selfish, religion or no religion.

Buddhism and Christianity disagree about God and about what happens to the individual after death – so what is your Way leading to, where is its supposed destination ?

Jesus said that the most important Commandment was “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and strength and will.”

Jesus also demanded that people placed their faith in Him as God, saying that no one comes to the Father except through Him.

How does this square with Buddhism ?

Which is certainly man-made, whereas Christianity is made by Jesus – that is, by God.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
13 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

Who died for you on the Cross ?

Jesus or Buddha ?

Religious faith isn’t only about conduct and ethics; that’s a very comfortable, middle-class viewpoint.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
12 days ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

You’re right and that is something I’ve long been wrestling with and couldn’t go into here for want of space.
(Yes, I’m the author of the piece)

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
12 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

Looks like you took the antisemitism from medieval Christianity, but how does any of that relate to the teachings of Jesus or Buddha?

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
14 days ago

The headline doesn’t really match the article. After a year of war, we are all tired. The dead are just as dead and there are more dead all the time, there is a multitude of thousands of wounded, many are still serving in the army, and many are still internally displaced, but the selfless volunteering of the first few months has given way to more sustainable solidarity. The public spirit wants to remember and does not want to go back where we were a year ago, but as whole is unable to sustain the emotional state and the same level of personal involvement for so long. Another undercurrent that Mirsky doesn’t mention is the increasingly unsustainable and unforgivable position of the Haredim who do not agree to help shoulder the burden of defending our survival, or advancing our economy.
In terms of the old yes-bibi-no-bibi, the diehard bitter extremists will remain so, but the large majority of the public wants a new start. Unfortunately in the current political landscape there is no-one who can give that, but I am optimistic that a change will brew.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  Rafi Stern

And millions of us are optimistic that thd pariah, terrorist state of Israel will soon be no more. That disgusting, genocidal entity has relinquished any right (doubtful) Steven had to exist.. built as it us on its sick ‘chosen people’ supremacist doctrine and hatred of all Goyim.. Of Satan himself set up a country it would hardly look as evil as Israel..

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
13 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

Are you for real? Who’s us? How is it that you speak for millions?

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
12 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

Don’t hold your breath Liam. Looks like us pesky Jews are going to still be around a lot longer than you want.

Chris Whybrow
Chris Whybrow
14 days ago

Every problem that the Israeli state has faced they have tried to solve with overwhelming, brutal violence. Is it surprising that one study indicated 40% of Israelis think the political divide will ultimately be resolved with that same method?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
14 days ago
Reply to  Chris Whybrow

When the other side wants you dead, diplomacy is going to come up short.

John Kanefsky
John Kanefsky
14 days ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Many on both sides want the other dead, or failing that to go somewhere else so they can have the land.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
14 days ago
Reply to  John Kanefsky

There is much more enthusiasm for genocide on the Muslim side, than on the Jewish side.

John Kanefsky
John Kanefsky
13 days ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

Yes, I’m sure that’s true, but that’s not the point.
The point is that many Israelis also feel this but the other way, especially after 7 October, and have little empathy for the suffering of ordinary Gazans.
And it doesn’t alter the fact that many Israelis wish the Palestinians would just disappear, or would like to expel them en bloc from northern Gaza and the whole of the West Bank, so they can have the land. A young Israeli ex-soldier said this to me several years ago (in much more lurid terms…). I have no idea what the percentages are, but I suspect they are quite large.
I see no end to this cycle. When two opposing viewpoints both believe they have the right to occupy the same land, there is no way forward. “Two states” is no longer realistic, if it ever was.
I get regularly voted down for saying one state on all the land west of the Jordan with all having the vote is the only equitable solution, but neither side will ever accept this.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  John Kanefsky

You are mistaken.. the Muslim side would.. after all, that was the situation pre 1948! Jews, Christians and Muslims lived sided by side as friends and neighbours for 1,300 years!

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
13 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

What rubbish. Jews and Christians lived as dhimmis under Muslim rule. Second class citizens who had to obey a load of onerous rules and pay the jizya just to be allowed to live. They still got slaughtered every so often.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

The figures would dispute that.. indeed the figures, and the rhetoric and the videos ALL show the opposite to be true.
ALL of the Muslim states surrounding Israel have many, many Jews living quite happily there, with full civil rights just like their Muslim neighbours. I have a Jewish friend in Türkiye 90% of his clients are Muslim.
Please stop spreading lies..

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

What an idiotic statement! In EVERY war the other side wants you dead yet you negotiate a ceasefire in the end! That gas yo be the stupidest statement I ever heard!

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
13 days ago
Reply to  Liam O'Mahony

No one in America actually thought about killing all the Germans during WWII.
You’re being very wrong-headed today.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  Chris Whybrow

The very definition of insanity.. trying the same failed solution over and over and yet expecting a different outcome! But their insane hatred snd supremacist delusionblinds their logic.

Jim Quirk
Jim Quirk
14 days ago

Why was security so lax on Gaza border on Oct 7 Where are the answers.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
14 days ago
Reply to  Jim Quirk

This is not the right time. Later.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago

Really? What makes you the arbiter of that? I think many thousands of Jrewush relatives and friends of those killed (by Hamas AND the IDF) might have a better claim to determine what time is right! You’re giving smug a bad name!

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
14 days ago

Solidarity stems from culture and the things that unite a people – a common language, shared history and traditions, an accepted value system, and so forth.
Why, then, do liberal societies have such a hard time grounding their solidarity? —–> Because too many such societies discount the importance of culture, believing instead in diversity as some sort of unifying principle and the misguided notion that all cultures are equal.
People who are hostile to liberal values take advantage of this viewpoint to the detriment of the rest of us. Look at how terrified the UK govt is to call out the elements trying to reshape your country, whether it’s the Islamification of the island or the gender madness.

Don Friend
Don Friend
14 days ago

Where are the Israeli voices condemning the ongoing slaughter of Gazans and now Lebanese? Good guys don’t kill and carry on killing innocent bystanders in the hope they can take out fighters.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
14 days ago
Reply to  Don Friend

I think you have received a jaundiced view of what’s going on there. The IDF has been very focused on and successful at slaughtering Hamas fighters. Close to 15,000 of them.
And I’m not sure that “innocent bystanders” really describes many of the adult Gazans. Many know where the hostages are, and who is responsible. By now any normal group of people would be lynching Hamas members. Instead they’re pitching their tents right next to places that Hamas is using. After the second hospital attack, back in Nov, ’23, why are they still clustering around the hospitals? Would you?

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago

You are a very sick person, overwhelmed by endless lies abd propaganda.. all those excuses are always used by every despotic, terrorist regime which is what Israel is; abd the world knows it.
FYI, Hamas numbers are double what they were on Oct 7th.. this is the natural outcome of rutally terrorising a people.. you recruit more freedom fighters.. I guarantee, if you saw your own family: your own lovely wife/mother and sweet children/sibblings incinerated before your eyes, you too would seek to avenge their grotesque deaths.. and you would be 10 times more extreme in your views that thosee killed before you.

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago
Reply to  Don Friend

Apparently an entire 2%+ of Israelis condemnthe war crimes and genocide.. most are afraid to speak out (I don’t judge them) but a few brave souls do (I salute them).. a few even within the Israeli news outlet Haaretz! ..and B’tsalem, the Israeli human rights organisation still speaks out. Even in Hell a few heroes dwell..

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
13 days ago

“Beheadings”? ..so Unherd I’d now just another bought and paid for mouthpiece of warcriminal, child slaughtering, genocidal state terrorism. A sad day for Unherd..