Israel's fourth founding: When the state proved it alone could not keep Israelis safe - opinion

Nations are not founded once. Israel’s purpose, Jewish sovereignty, has not changed since 1948. But the assumptions about how to secure it, and how to build a nation around it, change with each era, and each time an era’s assumptions collapse, Israel is remade.

Israel is now entering its fourth founding, a season in which old assumptions give way to new geopolitical, social, and economic realities, and in which our people decide again who it is and what it is for. Never has so much been at stake in the Diaspora-Israel relationship. That, too, is being reexamined and reinvented.

The United Jewish Appeal’s 1948 “Year of Destiny” campaign raised more than $150 million from over a million donors, then the largest campaign in the history of private philanthropy.

In 1950, David Ben-Gurion and the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein struck a bargain that would define the relationship for decades: Israel would make no political claim on American Jews, and American Jews would not interfere in Israel’s domestic affairs, but the money and political support would keep coming.

The deal rested on an older Zionist conviction, shlilat hagolah, the negation of the Diaspora, which held that Jewish life outside Israel was a lesser form of Jewish life. American Jews were welcomed as donors and advocates, never as partners.

Israel refounded its sense of self: posters of Moshe Dayan adorned the bedrooms of Jewish children, and the Jewish state moved to the center of global Jewish life. But pride is a feeling, not a voice. That year, 94% of Israelis surveyed said Jews abroad must support the state, while only 43% thought they should have an opinion about its internal affairs.

The third founding came in 1985, when the socialist economy died. The pioneers’ utopia had begun to crack after 1967, but it took inflation of roughly 445% to bury it. A painful stabilization plan, with deep budget cuts, wage and price controls and a sharp devaluation, cleared the ground for the Start-Up Nation: inflation fell below 20%, and per capita output was growing about 4% a year by the early 1990s.

Seventy-eight years after the British Mandate ended, the Jewish state held $235 billion in foreign reserves, more than the empire that once governed it. A country that had survived on the generosity of others could now stand on its own, and the negation of the Diaspora seemed nearly complete.

Yet the old bargain, money without a voice, outlived the need for the money. In 2016, after years of negotiation, the government approved a pluralistic prayer space at the Western Wall, with a council that would have given Reform and Conservative leaders a role in running it. In 2017, under pressure from its ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, it froze the deal, and many American Jews felt insulted and abandoned. A voice granted could be withdrawn. It would take a catastrophe to change the terms.

THE FOURTH founding begins with what died on October 7: the idea that the state alone could keep Israelis safe. The onslaught did more than murder and kidnap; it forced a Jewish reckoning.

Israelis, shocked by the establishment’s failure to detect the threat and to protect them, lost trust in their government and felt that the state had broken its covenantal promise to prevent the mass murder of Jews.

Civilians rushed in where the government could not, caring for devastated communities in the Gaza border region and the North. New kinds of philanthropy emerged because Israelis would not wait for the government to act.

In the first weeks of the war, they raised hundreds of millions of shekels, much of it in small gifts, and roughly half of all Israeli adults volunteered. Last year alone, Israeli donors put $140m. into Israel’s first donor-advised fund.

When I met with Tali Nir, CEO of 121, a nonprofit shaping social policy in Israel, she acknowledged a sea change happening in Israeli society. The generations before hers built the essential infrastructure of the state: its roads, its army, its politics. Her generation’s job is to build the society. Social change, she said, is the next wave of Zionism.

The Israelis of October 8 are the new “New Jew”: resourceful and resilient, and they take care of their own. They have also learned that their bond with American Jews is indelible and invaluable for both of our futures.

The grand bargain of the past is being renegotiated. Israelis no longer negate the Diaspora; they embrace it. And North American Jews must adjust to a new power dynamic in the relationship:  Israel no longer needs patrons. It needs partners.

Some will say talk of partnership is premature, with the North and South still rebuilding, an economy strained by war, and a military that leans on American support. But Israel’s survival no longer depends on American Jewish charity, and what kind of society it becomes may depend on whether Israelis and American Jews build it together.

More than a century ago, Ahad Ha’am hoped that a renewed Jewish culture in Palestine would one day produce a state that was “not merely a state of the Jews, but a really Jewish state.” That is our work now: the civic infrastructure of a society that is democratic, pluralistic, and compassionate.

Israelis know they cannot build it alone. Many I met see something to learn from more than three and a half centuries of Jewish life in America: our institutions, our philanthropy, our pluralistic Judaism. We have at least as much to learn from them about resilience, courage and service.

Partnership will make uncomfortable demands and require concessions from both parties. American Jews must invest alongside Israelis rather than on their behalf, and let Israelis set the priorities.

Both parties will have to exercise humility; we are each other’s teachers, and each other’s students. We both have hard things to say to one another about what we think is best for the Jewish future. In this, we are joint stakeholders, neither silent donors nor distant critics.