Fighting for democracy while facing my dayenu

Facing death, MARK BAKER contemplates the place of Zionism in his life and the values he wants to leave to his baby daughter.

We all know in our heads that one day we will die. Naively, we believe that such knowledge somehow prepares us for the dreaded moment when we learn that the end is closer. Or at least I did. Rather foolishly, I fantasised that I would set up a tent in the Judean desert, go on a hunger strike and wait until a final peace accord would be signed between Israelis and Palestinians. I knew it was a piece of shticky melodrama, but I actually believed that my one last vainglorious tilt at living would be an act of megaphone martyrdom.

Was it the circumstances in which I imagined facing my own death - witnessing the deaths of my first wife Kerryn and my brother Johnny  - that explains my lack of insight? In awe of their dignity did I somehow believe that it would be my political convictions that would define me as inspiring to the end?

Naively (again) I did not imagine I would get to test myself so soon. I quickly learned that what is important to me narrowed into a series of concentric circles at whose core lies my family, followed by close friends. Almost all my thoughts and actions are for my wife Michelle, children, mother and grandchildren, and the pain of witnessing their grief and carrying mine.

Grand political acts and small ones exist outside my orbit. In my new inner world of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, nurses, and oncologists, I have become oblivious to everything I once cared about passionately – the political state of the world, ideological debates, the doomsday news cycle fed to me by the second on social media.

It’s difficult to explain what it’s like to live without a potential future. All that matters is staring into the sum-total of my life and reconciling myself to its blessings and flaws. Now is not the time to belatedly try and fit in all the things I always wanted to do, as if in the 11^th hour one can define who you are and the life you have lived.

Yet these past weeks, I felt the mirror crack reading about the constitutional coup in Israel. The attack on Israel’s Basic Laws, the sacrifice of the judiciary as a trade-off for building a protective dome around corrupt politicians, the routinisation of violence against Palestinians with a legal stick, served as a siren for those who care deeply about democratic institutions in Israel. In response, the inspirational mass protests against Israel’s neo-fascist Prime Minister and the bribe of a private police force of "brownshirts" for a racist demagogue, penetrated my medicated smokescreen and compelled me to turn on the Apple screen. The dire and spiralling collapse of a country’s core principles I have for so long believed in and fought for, the assault on an idea as vital and ancient as democracy, coupled with the stirring response of so many of its citizens who showed that there are limits (yesh gvul) to what can be done in their name, awoke a sense of collective shame (busha) in me.