Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022 after only a year and a half, blind to the fact that he was taking control of the state during the most precarious period in a nation’s life: its eighth decade.
Let me explain. The first generation of a country is the one that fought. It had no time for existential dilemmas because it was preoccupied with surviving. The second generation was too busy with state-building to entertain such questions.
But the third and fourth generations—my generation—are those for whom the state is a birthright, already built, paved, and functioning. All the profound existential dilemmas that our grandparents tucked away in the attic have come knocking on our national door. A nation’s eighth and ninth decades almost invariably mark the moment when it tears itself apart over the ultimate question: identity.
The United States, in its ninth decade of existence in the 1860s, emerged as a wonderland unlike any other ever seen. The pursuit of happiness swept across the country. Then, Americans found themselves confronting an unsettling question. How, Americans pondered, is it possible that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the words “All men are created equal,” also owns more than 600 black slaves?
The answer: It is not possible. In the United States, two values collided with devastating force: the right to liberty and the right to property. The American Civil War resolved this clash of two values through bloodshed, claiming over 600,000 American lives, including that of the president.
But America was lucky; it survived. Countries do not always survive their identity wars. We all know the Soviet Union’s fate in its eighth decade.
Against this backdrop, Israel’s five elections in four years, ending with Netanyahu’s return to power at the end of 2022, suddenly come into focus: This was the Israeli civil war.
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