FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER

The First Temple lasted about 400 years, the Second Temple held for 600 years, and the Third Temple—if modern Israel may assume that name—is dangerously close to kicking the bucket at 75. Only this time there is no Assyria to whisk ancient Israelites into oblivion, no Babylon to herd Judeans into exile, and no Rome to extinguish Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Today the Jewish state is demolishing itself from within.

The buildup began, perhaps, when Menachem Begin won by a landslide in 1977 by riding the hostility of Mizrahi “Second Israel” against the largely Ashkenazi “First Israel.” During the four following decades, Israel’s fragile web of coexistences was politicized and crudely mishandled. Since the late 2000s, Likud’s public voice has been aggressively sectarian: anti-secular, anti-liberal and anti-Ashkenazi. The three millennia of Jewish history became chips in Israel’s political game, with nationalists claiming biblical borders miraculously emptied of Arabs and ultra-Orthodox leaders despising nonbelievers.

Secular and liberal Jews like myself entered the fray to claim our right as legitimate heirs to Jewish history and culture, with a modern and selective approach to such treasures as the Bible and the Talmud. I tend to believe that the Bible was wiser than we are when it commanded equal human rights for the strangers “living among you.” The conquest of the Palestinians—whether or not their leadership ever allowed a viable peace agreement—sent its rot down to the roots, both Jewish and democratic. It educated three generations of Israelis to believe that democracy is the tyranny of the majority and that the losers need not be heard. First, the Palestinians; then, the Israeli Arabs; soon, the left; possibly the seculars. Is the great Jewish tradition of intellectual democracy, of putting differences into words, dead and gone?

So much for prophecies of doom. Here is a cautious prophecy of redemption: At

75 years, Israel is not a new country. Its democracy dates back to 1897, when the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel. It was a democratic congress, even more so (and astoundingly early) in the following year when women entered as full delegates. But only in 2023 did Israeli civil society discover its dormant power. We are now more comprehensive than the so-called “First Israel” of the secular, liberal and sometimes well-to-do. There are many more of us than merely “the left,” and we are out to reclaim symbols all too easily hijacked by the nationalists, including Israel’s flag and national anthem, “Hatikva.” Above all, we have the leading light of the Declaration of Independence, a magnificent document of Jewish national pride, commitment to peace with the Arabs, and equal civil and human rights.

I am awed by the number of my countrywomen and countrymen who are out on the streets fighting this good fight. It is a very dangerous moment, civil society pitched against state, honest ideology straining against counter-ideology coupled with power-mongering and individual self-interest. I must conclude, fingers trembling on the keyboard, that 2023 may become a very significant year in Jewish history. May the Third Temple remain standing, but only as a democracy.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli essayist and professor emerita of history at the University of Haifa.

Yitz Greenberg

Israel represents the reentry of the Jewish people into history. For most of the last 2,000 years, Jews had only an internal life, enough to keep us alive and unassimilated, but generally without the rights of citizenship or sovereignty that would allow us to decide our own fate. The realization of our national self-determination was one of the great turning points of Jewish history.