Opinion | Israel vs. the Israeli People: The State Was Supposed to Protect Us. Instead, It Turned on Us

A Tel Aviv protest earlier this month, following the firing of Defense Minister Gallant. We stand wide-eyed in the face of the decisions made by the government.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

Beyond the misery, the sadness, the mourning over what could have been and will now not be, abides the helplessness: the appalling feeling that we are being taken willy-nilly to a place where we don't want to be. As if in a bad dream, we are in the passenger seat of a bus whose brakes have failed, and the borders of the country are our closed windows.

"Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course," says one of the strangers who have come to arrest K. in Franz Kafka's novel "The Trial," giving precise expression to the helplessness of the citizen in the face of the machinery of the state. "We've been abducted," shout the demonstrators in Tel Aviv and across from the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem, giving vent to the same angst.

The helplessness that underlies our present situation places us opposite the vast power of the state. We encounter that power when we are inducted or are informed about a tax audit, but at present the lines are sharpened and the danger of losing all we hold dear looms clear and immediate. As though we've been transformed from citizens into subjects, we stand wide-eyed in the face of the decisions made by the government. Like the faithful in the hands of an angry God, we are unable to wield influence and also have no knowledge of what to expect.

In his 1829 essay "Reflections on Tragedy," Benjamin Constant pointed out the profound transformation that occurred in the human consciousness upon the entry into the modern age. Constant explains that it no longer makes sense to write tragedies that pit the individual against the forces of fate or the gods – they are no longer on our mind, and in any event are not the entities that are threatening us. They have been supplanted by other forces, far more concrete and no less appalling:

"The social order, the action of society on the individual, in diverse phases and in diverse epochs, this network of institutions and conventions which envelops us from our birth and is not broken until our death, these are the tragic motivations which one needs to know how to manipulate. They are entirely equal to the fatality of the ancients; their weight composes all that was invincible and oppressive in that fatality… Our public will be more moved by this combat of the individual against the social order that robs or pinions him than by Oedipus pursued by destiny or by Orestes pursued by the Furies" (translation by Barry Daniels).

Constant (1767-1830), a Swiss-French political thinker and one of the first to characterize himself as a "liberal," grasped that something fundamental had changed in human consciousness. The transition to modernity and the process of secularization separated us from the worldview holding that every grain of sand and every blade of grass are part of a comprehensive divine plan, that all of us, like them, are entwined in a complete and holistic order and answer to forces larger than us. At the same time, the rise of the bureaucratic nation-state posited other institutions, no less large and threatening, to whose authority we are subordinate.

A sign saying "We expected Iran to attack, not the prime minister," during a protest against the firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, earlier this month.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

What frightened the authors of the Greek tragedies was the hand of fate, of the Moirai, the goddesses that determined each person's course of life and the moment of their death. The Romans were fearful of Fortuna, the goddess of fortune and fate, and the ancient Hebrews were of course daunted by the Almighty. What frightens us are the state's enforcement and bureaucratic mechanisms. It's between the teeth of their cogwheels, not those of the goddesses of fate, that we are liable to be caught and ground.

Indeed, the creation of great dramas of this time depends not on the wrath of the gods but on the tension between the individual and the government. From Kleist's "Michael Kohlhaas" through Kafka's "Trial" to Brecht's "Caucasian Chalk Circle," we are witness to the inevitable friction between the individual and the political-social system, without there being a need for higher forces. Not theology, but politics. Not fate, but the government. What drives us is not the connection with the divine being, but the connection with the ruling powers, and we're more apprehensive of an arbitrary arrest than of God's judgment on Yom Kippur.

In the face of the gods' power, religion offered us mechanisms of protection: formulations of prayer, means of purification, rituals of atonement. One of the great innovations of monotheism vis-à-vis the pagan religions was the possibility of forging a covenant with the divine, which forms an alliance that operates not only for the benefit of the King of All Kings but also for the benefit of the human individual. God promised order and security, not only exploitation or capricious displays of power.

In like fashion, in the face of the immense power of the state, various political conceptions arose that sought to protect the citizen. Liberal thought (Constant was one of its leading exponents) also called for striking an agreement – a social contract – with the authorities, which would limit their power. A liberal regime is barred from encroaching on a number of important facets of our life: property, expression, movement, conscience, etc. In a liberal state, human and civil rights are preserved, and we are protected, at least in regard to them, from the strong hand and outstretched arm of the government.

The democratic idea aimed to go even further and to reverse the order of things: to vest citizens with power over the government; if they wish, they can topple and replace it. Now it's the regime that needs to fear the judgment of the citizenry, in a manner that Kleist and Kafka – not to mention the Patriarch Abraham – could barely have imagined. True, we still would not want to encounter the income tax authorities, but life in a liberal democracy is like life under a merciful and compassionate God: We are protected as long as we do the necessary minimum.

What we have undergone in the past two years is a gradual shattering of all these basic assumptions and mechanisms. First the government set out to infringe on the liberal space and to emasculate the sole protection that Israel's citizens have in the face of their government: the Supreme Court. After the outbreak of the war – as a result of a colossal blunder by that same government – the regime focused primarily on its own self-preservation. Subsequently the regime cultivated its base at the expense of the commonalty, and sent our sons and daughters to the front amid a protracted refusal to present a clear strategy or to make clear its intentions. Now we are being subjected to rockets and missiles and being led by a government in which a delinquent like Itamar Ben-Gvir is named the minister of national security.

A building in Kiryat Yam that was damaged by a rocket in October.Credit: Rami Shllush

Moreover, surveys conducted since the start of the war show that this government rests on the support of a minority of the country's citizens and that its leaders suffer from basic lack trust among the public. A government for which support is partial and declining can only intensify its citizens' feeling of having been taken hostage. Add to this the government's denial of its responsibility for the crisis, disdain for professionalism and expertise, and lack of readiness to correct its path, and you get a population that feels it is held captive by an erratic and unpredictable demon.

The Israelis who are now fleeing abroad are impelled by a sense of helplessness. In a properly run political system, a regime that acts against our personal worldview can be suffered based on confidence that it is serving all the citizens, and that in any case it can be replaced. In an average country, there are no bloodthirsty enemies across the border that will exploit the weakness of a corrupt and incompetent government in order to kill its citizens. Israel's broken politics manifests the complete opposite: We are subject to a government that promotes blatantly sectarian politics, that is responding to the biggest crisis in our history without a strategy and that is putting our lives at risk by having failed, for more than a year, to restore security to our cities.

We find ourselves in a modern tragedy, albeit not an uncommon one. The citizens of Russia, Venezuela and our poor neighbor Syria know this story from up-close. Now we are extras in the same play, in which an egocentric regime carries a population toward destruction. A "mortal god" was Hobbes' term for the state. Here, that same god is violating the basic covenant between him and his citizens, and in his blindness believes not only that they need to maintain silence and go on placing trust in him, but also to continue offering sacrifices at his altar.

From monotheism we have shifted to paganism, and there's no knowing what the Moloch will decide tomorrow. A rebellion against such an abusive state-god like this is called revolution. The secularization process resulting from such theological politics is called emigration.

Oedipus' subjects endured a plague because they lived under a sinning monarch. Only his abdication saved them, and fortunately for them he was capable of taking responsibility and departing when he saw what he had brought about. Israel's citizens are suffering from an irresponsible government that knows very well what it has inflicted on them but is only tightening its hold on power. If that looks like a struggle against an angry giant, it's not by chance. This is what the plotline of the calamity of fate looks like in our age.

Tomer Persico's book "Liberalism: Its Roots, Ideals and Crises" was published earlier this year by Dvir (in Hebrew).