This war has torn apart Israeli society

If the peace agreement between Hamas and Israel goes as planned, over the next 42 days, 33 of the 98 Israeli hostages held in Hamas captivity for nearly 450 days will be brought home, and some of the troops will be released from duty.

Israelis are waiting for this moment with both joy and trepidation. There is no way to know if these first 33 are alive or dead – or what that implies regarding the remaining 65, since cruelly, Hamas has never released a list of names of the hostages, living or the dead. Only when the hostages come home, alive or in a coffin, will their families know their fate.

Maybe, as they did during the only other hostage release, in November 2023, Israelis will stand together around televisions throughout the country, united in our desire to embrace the hostages.

But I doubt it. On October 7, 2023, the Hamas attackers forced us to look into an abyss of pure evil, and we will never be the same. Israeli society has always been fractured and divided, but in recent months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played on our fears, twisting the trauma and dread that we all feel to spread rancor and bitterness to ensure that his camp of constituents unites against his opponents.

Even the families of the hostages have become fodder for Netanyahu’s campaigns of poisoned rhetoric, with those who support Netanyahu attacking those who do not. Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan, was prohibited from entering the Knesset to attend a committee meeting to which she had been invited by the opposition, because, the Knesset security detail was instructed, she is “disruptive.” Her son, Matan, is unlikely to be among the first set of hostages to be released, yet she is pushing for acceptance of the current deal, and is deeply critical of Netanyahu. Relatives of hostage Liri Elbag, who are also critical of Netanyahu, found a funeral wreath by their front door. Neither Netanyahu nor his supporters have denounced these acts.

At the beginning of the war, electronic speed-limit signs on the highway promised, “together we will win.” Netanyahu never defined “we” or “win,” but somehow those hokey flashing signs offered a kind of collective comfort.

But the war has been going on for 450 days, and we are changed. We are coarser, more cynical, angrier and more hateful of each other and the Other than we ever were. We are fractured by differences and resentments, often defining ourselves more by whom we hate than by whom we embrace.

Today, the differences between us are not just the well-known differences that have accompanied us since the inception of the State: Jews vs. Arabs; religious vs. secular; right vs. left; Mizrachm vs. Ashkenazim; rich vs. poor; periphery vs. centre. Today, we are plagued by more subtle, and more dangerous differences, built on identities and ideologies.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity against us, as Jews, as Israelis, as women, as children. The world largely didn’t care, or even blamed us. We are angry, and we want revenge. We are entitled to it. A large part of Israeli society demands that we be allowed to give free reign to our most violent impulses. We have the right to do to others what was done to us, they say.

But a significant section of Israelis, refuse to give in to that very real thirst for revenge. We refuse to allow Hamas to dictate our responses. We believe justice must be meted out according to the standards of international law.

The abandonment by the civilized world, who ignored or justified the acts of cruelty and sexual violence perpetrated against us has convinced some that we are destined to live alone, to live by the sword. Some think that it is self-defeating to search for a moral compass that will lead us through the Middle East morass; others of us believe that is the only path to a worthwhile individual and collective life.

The division between these two groups of Israelis as to the nature of justice and the justifiability of the war is an existential danger to our society, and ultimately to the existence of the state.

There has always been a tension between Israel as a democratic and Israel as a Jewish state. Most of us have deeply believed that we can be both democratic and Jewish, even if we could never really articulate how these two ideologies are supposed to go together. But now that modus vivendi has come apart, too.

The zealous supremacy movement that has lurked here for generations has grown more strident during this war, encouraged by Netanyahu’s base. In the name of Jewish supremacy, under cover of the battles far away Gaza, they have taken over the resources of Palestinians and commandeered the public coffers to build their settlements in the west Bank, at the expense of health, education and social welfare in Israel proper. They want to build in Gaza, too.

Whenever this war ends, when all the hostages are home and in recovery, when the dead are buried, the soldiers discharged, and the wounded in rehab, we must begin think about our future in this region.

The divisions within Israeli society will not begin to heal until this government is replaced. Led by Netanyahu, who would sell-off Israeli’s most valuable social and security assets anyone who will help him to stay in power, this government has contaminated public life through nepotism and cronyism. They have given away ministerial positions and other high-ranking jobs as bribes for political loyalty. Netanyahu drew the battle lines of this war to defend himself, not the country.

Netanyahu extended this war for his own purposes, in order to avoid a Commission of Inquiry that will certainly detail his responsibility for the failures of October 7t, prevent a government collapse, and stay out of jail. The fighting should have ended months ago; we could have declared victory after we annihilated both the Hamas and the Hezbollah leadership, and decimated their weapons. So many soldiers, so many hostages, so many innocent Gazans would still be alive. None of them died on the altar of the defence of the State; they died on the altar of the defence of Netanyahu.

It will be difficult to heal, because so many of us are so angry. But we must begin to build an inclusive social democratic movement that can save us from our cynicism, repair the social contract between the citizens and the state, and provide us with a cohesive sense of collective purpose. All of these have been destroyed in this war. We must build a movement dedicated to equality, social justice, and the inherent value of human life and not to military security or Jewish supremacy.

None of this will be easy. No real healing process ever is. But in order to make peace with our external enemies, we must first make peace with ourselves.