Many years back, I visited Gaza as part of a state delegation. We toured factories financed by American Jews and Gulf Arabs to manufacture goods for sale in Israel and abroad. Our guide, a well-known Palestinian politician, did hilarious impersonations of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, and spoke with pride of the “New Gaza,” soon to be the “Singapore of the Middle East.” It all looked so close, so very doable. Soon, Israelis and Egyptians would be meeting at luxury hotels on the Gaza coast.
And then Yasser Arafat grew tired of playing statesman, Fatah drained the foreign investments into private bank accounts, and Hamas won an election with the promise to end the corruption. A few months later, Hamas members were throwing Fatah members to their deaths from rooftops, with worse to come. Gaza had rejoined the Arab world with a vengeance. The Palestinian politician who had accompanied our group went into exile in Israel.
Gaza’s deterioration began with the competition between Hamas and more extreme Islamist rivals, including Islamic Jihad, Al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad, and Aknaf Bayt al-Maqdis. But clearly it didn’t end there. With each group competing on which could be more savage than the next, in the end, the only products manufactured in Gaza were instruments of war.
What happened in Gaza was not an isolated phenomenon. All across the region, Muslim states were coming apart at the seams. The vast majority of states in the Middle East were imposed by force — the result of competition between European colonial powers over resources, rather than the organic product of the inhabitants’ political aspirations, so it’s no surprise that these states have proven less than entirely stable.
But it isn’t only the former colonial states that were in trouble. The older nations — organically evolved and deeply rooted — have also been floundering, for different reasons. Egypt is facing an economic and ecological disaster, while Iran is facing a catastrophic demographic decline.
Is Israel an outlier?
Meanwhile, Israel is, as usual, firmly in the middle of it all; while its sense of national identity is closer to that of historical states like Iran and Egypt, Israel’s bottom-up organizational dynamics has more in common with the Sunni states.
Israel may be immune to the centrifugal forces pulling colonial states apart, but not to the centripetal forces threatening organic states. This became clear in the months before the catastrophic attacks of October 7th. The country seemed on the verge of a civil war. Weekly protests against—and for—the judicial reform, rightwing and leftwing members of the same family not on speaking terms, large numbers of volunteer reservists saying they would not show up for duty if the reforms went through.
And now those reservists are deployed in Gaza or the northern border. Those who weren’t on speaking terms are sharing space in tents and tanks. And the protest movement has retooled itself as a massive logistics machine, stepping in to get food and necessities to displaced families and the IDF alike. The pogrom of Simchat Torah has ironically ushered in a tremendous sense of unity amongst the Jewish people, especially in Israel, where only a few weeks ago matters seemed so polarized.
The lessons of exile
There is more to this than the coming together in the face of a common enemy. The current unity stems not so much from the sense of being under attack, as from being reminded of our history. In exile, the Jewish people gained what very few other nations have ever experienced — the lessons of prolonged helplessness.
These lessons go a long way back. The Israel that was reborn from the Babylonian exile was very different from the scattered tribes that had gone into exile only 70 years earlier. Similarly, Israel today is a more cohesive, more resilient political entity that it was prior to the Roman exile.
Israel has gained more than merely the unifying effects of shared pain; it has gained experience in self-government unique in the history of nations. As a pariah people living on the periphery of “civilized nations,” Jewish communities developed a version of self-administration that combined parts of the older, consensus-based systems still seen in the Arab world, with situational constraints imposed from without.
The resulting Jewish institutions had to function with only “soft power” as a means of enforcement: government without an executive. Because the top position of power was left empty (since kingship belongs only to God), holders of the next level of power (the Parnassim and the Hakhamim) were seen as custodians and functionaries; they could achieve only so much power in the eyes of the people without overstepping the bounds imposed by society.
The only real spheres of control available to Jewish self-government were those that are an after-thought for most national governments — things usually left to lower-level functionaries, such as education, social welfare, local taxation and enforcement of market rules. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when your best political minds are limited to running a society — when the option of playing on the chessboard of high politics is non-existent.
The challenge of keeping it together
For the moment, even with all the uncertainty surrounding us regarding the release of further hostages, the continuation of the war and what exactly is the government’s end game, many of us in Israel are feeling temporarily revived by the tremendous coming together of our people.
The problem now facing us is—ironically—that the crisis won’t last forever, and the divisiveness which was so present only a few weeks ago in Israel could set in once again. The questions facing us now are how do we maintain this sense of unity in Israel when the crisis is over? Clearly, we don’t want the post-war situation to be simply a reprise of the internal strife that paralyzed the nation prior to the war.
Part of what gave rise to the polarization before the war is that our current governmental system has no connection to the political models that worked so well throughout our history. Rather than being bottom-up, with most governance taking place at the community level, our current system is top-down. Worse yet, it borrows heavily from nations with very different histories and cultural norms.
By contrast, the traditional Jewish political institutions are uniquely adapted to the modern, information-centric world. This horizontally distributed system is exactly the model that is coming into vogue in many places in the world as the sovereignty of nation-states continues to erode. The decentralized Jewish political model, developed over 2,000 years of exile, is the wave of the future.
And yet this bottom-up model is not the one on which our current Israeli political system is based, nor is it well-represented in local government. Instead, we see it Israel’s robust civil society. We saw it in action as the protest movement morphed—seemingly overnight—into a well-oiled machine to get goods and services to people displaced by the war. Volunteers jumped into action to get reservists to their bases, and to match volunteers with farmers to save the harvest. Our top-down government, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.
One thing that those on both sides of the judicial reform issue seem to agree on is that our current political system isn’t ideal. So perhaps we can renew our sense of purpose by working together to refine the system—by consensus, rather than top-down. A good place to start would be to combine the lessons learned in exile with our native bottom-up organizational culture. Such a political entity would potentially have the resilience of a horizontally-networked structure and the efficiency of a top-down hierarchical structure.
A difficult challenge? Definitely! But, as David ben Gurion famously said, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.” We all know that we must learn from past mistakes. But it is equally important to learn from past successes!
