Good news for Israel is standing tip-toe on the misty mountain tops - opinion

The headlines read: “Government doubles teacher salaries and halves classroom pupil numbers”; “Innovative medical campus in the South provides home-grown doctors for two brand new hospitals in Israel’s periphery”; “Groundbreaking R&D center in Kiryat Shmona attracts tens of thousands of Israelis back home from abroad”; “Sixty thousand haredim recruit to the army and 20,000 more enter the workplace, as new government gifts haredi schools with core curriculum”; and “Peace talks begin on historic treaty between Israelis and Palestinians.”

A fantasy for airheads? An impossible dream?

Not so, according to the current government opposition: It’s simply a matter of reorganizing priorities.

And change has never been more urgent. With the terrifying upsurge of antisemitism from Manchester to Bondi Beach and beyond, Jews everywhere are wondering whether Israel is the only alternative to [the] fear. On a recent trip to London, I was struck by how many of our friends and family are considering buying a bolt-hole on the beach here; many already own homes in the Holy Land.

It’s a crazy reversal of everything that seemed so stable: I remember endless conversations with my late husband after visits abroad – should we be living in the fleshpots too, with bigger cars, without army service for our kids, without intifadas?

But is it safe? And is it a haven?

Ironically, the question of the day here is whether our kids – and for that matter, us too, – have foreign passports. Where will we go if the present coalition is voted in again, when the sham political investigation inevitably finds the people in power on Oct. 7 innocent of any responsibility?

Many, many of our doctor/dentist/hi-tech, educated, contributing kids say they can no longer live in a country that taxes them to fund cultists; where they spend years of their lives (and sometimes die) in an army for which the black-coated need not enlist, while the coalition tramples on basic human rights, and turns good governance into a sham.

And how sad is that?

We seem to be in a battle for our very lives here, and the fight is not against external enemies. The clear and present danger, or so it seems, to an estimated just over half the country at least, is from our government, which doles out billions to special interests instead of fixing our clogged roads and building more trains, and which sneers at our High Court and vilifies our judges and journalists.

But change is coming, claims Efrat Rayten, MK for The Democrats. Once a successful TV and film star, and former partner in the huge Goldfarb, Gross, Seligman law firm, Rayten represented dozens of high-profile clients as a litigator and worked, pro bono, for the families of the 10 pre-army youngsters who drowned in a flash flood during their mechina [army preparation] year.

“We demanded a state commission of inquiry into that disaster,” Rayten recalled, “and after three and a half years we got one. In the end, justice wins out.”

That fight against negligence and refusal to take responsibility ignited something in her. She entered politics for the Labor Party and served as chair of the Labor and Welfare Committee for a year and a half in Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s Government of Change.

According to Rayten, the elections of 2026 will be critical for Israel’s future: A return to the values of a liberal, democratic, Jewish, Zionistic state is standing tip-toe on the misty mountain tops, just waiting to swing into gear. A "government of change" will, she claims, rejig priorities: money will flow into security, education, academia, hi-tech, and health – and shore up the values of Zionism that reflect Israel’s raison d’etre: to be a Jewish, democratic, and thriving society of excellence on all fronts.

“As we’ve seen recently, it’s so easy to harm a fragile democracy – Israel doesn’t have a constitution or two Houses, or even a limitation on terms of office,” she said. “Our government would anchor in law term limits, human rights, the attorney-general’s role, funding for authorities, and Basic Laws; we would take politics out of law.”

According to her, Netanyahu’s gang view learning Torah as more crucial than security or science, plus they have no plan for stage two of this current endless mess. We need to formulate a way to separate from the Palestinians into a two-state solution and not leave US President Donald Trump to make our decisions. “It’s all very well to say we can rely on Trump,” she said, “but what about America’s next president? Are we going to abrogate all our political decisions to the USA?”

Despite the incredible, ubiquitous balagan here, despite the government’s crass bulldozing of everything we once held sacred, Rayten remains optimistic. “The opposite of despair is hope,” she declared. “Our prime minister has ironically returned to us the notion of hope – the hope of unseating him and undoing the terrible damage he and his coalition have inflicted upon us.”

Rayten is beautiful; she flashes her star-quality smile, her quiet assurance born of education, experience, worldliness, compassion, and unequivocal love for our country. It is impossible not to contrast her with certain statements made by women in our present coalition.

We will remain a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. No small-minded coalition of cultists and leaders, many who have faced criminal indictments, will crush our freedoms and extinguish that hope.

Roll on, elections.■