The War on Israeli Modernity
By Yossi Klein Halevi
The Blogs - Times of Israel
“This coming election, the fifth in less than four years, is qualitatively different from the ones that preceded it. Those other elections were referendums on the worthiness of Benjamin Netanyahu to lead the state of Israel. This time, the stakes are far higher: Consciously or not, Israelis will be voting on the future of Israel as a modern state.
“The most devastating component of the coalition against Israel’s ability to function as a sane, modern society is the nationalist far-right. Ben Gvir’s 'Jewish Power' party (which is running jointly with the 'Religious Zionism' party) would destroy the intactness of Israeli society, replacing the fragile coexistence between Israel’s Arabs and Jews with nothing less than civil war.
“For all the tensions, most Arabs and Jews have learned the habit of practical coexistence. This is one of Israeli society’s most impressive if largely unacknowledged achievements. Despite the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Arabs and Jews interact, often easily and sometimes intimately, in parks and shopping malls and hospitals, as neighbors. Ben Gvir and his allies regard this interaction as intolerable.
“One of our responsibilities as custodians of this land is to rein in religious extremism, its uncontrolled passions and outrages, whether from Hamas and Islamic Jihad or from within our own midst. Giving power to Ben Gvir would betray that sacred trust.
“Our ability to remain a decent nation despite relentless pressures that would have driven other societies to madness is one of the glories of the state of Israel. Those who would criminalize Israel and turn it into the sum of its failures erase the context in which Israel struggles to find its balance between moral imperative and relentless threat. The Israeli far right and the anti-Zionist left are united in their contempt for Israel’s heroic struggle for balance. Ben Gvir would abandon that struggle and turn us into a state driven by hatred and vengeance and justified by messianic bombast.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a member of Heart of a Nation’s Editorial Committee and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI). His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller.
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