Freedom
“Freedom” isn’t always, as Kris Kristofferson (with Janis Joplin’s help) claimed, “just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Sometimes, freedom is what you know you can’t afford to lose.
Yom ha’Atzma’ut / Independence Day, celebrated this year from Wednesday to Thursday evening, April 30 – May 1, marks the Hebrew calendar anniversary of Israel’s founding on May 14, 1948. Zionist leaders had accepted and the Arab world, including Palestinian leaders, rejected a two-state compromise advanced by the United Nations. Having declared independence, Israel’s Jewish population – native-born in the Holy Land along with refugees from the Holocaust and Middle East, and other immigrants – immediately turned to the challenge of fighting and winning a war of national self-defense against enemies bent on genocide.
Decades later, amid continuing, seemingly endless conflict with Palestinians and other hostile neighbors, there is for the Jewish State a new war of independence to be fought and won.
It is an internal political struggle over what kind of society Israelis wish to have: democratic or autocratic. For the time being at least, they have (thank God!) not engaged in in pitched battles, neighbor against neighbor, but sectarian divisions show. Many citizens are out in the streets protesting peacefully. The demonstrations register rising objections and increasing resistance to a government aiming to weaken rule of law.
In the name of patriotic duty, backed by a large swathe of the electorate, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and parliamentary allies are attempting to silence critics, scuttle judicial process that criminally implicates him and people who work for him, and intimidate citizens who oppose his power grab. His harshest critics accuse him of worse; we see his execution of the protracted war against Hamas as a cynical and heartless pretext for further evasion.
We believe his crimes are great and numerous. He has wrapped himself in the Israeli flag to shield himself from legal accountability and further consolidate his partisan base and personal power. Americans will see striking parallels with their own president, Donald Trump.
America too is witnessing a downslide into fascism. An American friend, Zach Smith, who is a historian and former teaching colleague, told me he thinks democracy in America is dead with authoritarianism on the rise; he states out loud what others are thinking to themselves. There are, of course, major differences between what’s happening in the U.S. and Israel.
My Israeli friend Shai Golan drew this contrast between the two leaders: “We have our own Trump ‘on steroids,’ more sinister and far more intelligent, who's now executing the sick agenda of the zealots (his coalition partners).”
As democracies throughout the world flirt with dictatorship and commitment to civil society ebbs, those who cherish their independence have a choice. We can either submit to would-be tyrants, letting them usurp our freedoms, or we can unite and fight back.
Israelis who value liberty are coming to grips with this challenge. The third Jewish commonwealth’s second war of independence is as consequential in its implications for Israel’s future as the first was for its establishment.
I became an Israeli citizen in November, 2021. I have been traveling back and forth for the past several years, and I intend to spend more and more time in Zikhron Yaakov, where I live when I’m in Israel. A major reason for my decision to make aliyah relates to the political situation there.
To live my democratic Jewish values, I could no longer just sit on the sidelines and complain about Israel’s nosedive into authoritarianism but had to give myself a voice in the country’s representative decision-making process. To do my part to remove the current coalition from power and bring in leaders who honor and respond to the popular will, I plan to be there for the legislative election, in 2026; that is, assuming that it’s not too late and elections still matter, or that a real one can even take place.
Living as a Jew 24/7 means taking responsibility for one’s Jewish community, wherever and however one lives. Fighting against despotic impulses in the body politic is necessary for its well-being.
We need to do more than just complain about what’s wrong in our society. As another rocker, Tom Petty, sang: “Everybody’s had to fight to be free / You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee.”
If we want to be free people, we have to fight. Israel, are you listening? America, are you listening?
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