This Yom Ha’atzmaut, it is worth rereading Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Written as the nascent Jewish state was fighting a war for its existence, it nevertheless emphasises values such as “full and equal citizenship” and extends a hand “to all neighbouring states and their people in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness”.
These are the foundational values of the State of Israel. If written today, it is not inconceivable that some Israeli government ministers, commentators and activists would castigate its authors as dangerously naïve and worse.
77 years on, cynical, reckless leadership is distancing Israel from its liberal and consensual founding vision. It is actively sowing division, undermining the unity and resilience of Israel and the Jewish people when it is most needed. Israel is therefore imperilled not only from outside but from within.
The consequences and trauma of Hamas’s barbaric 7 October attack remain raw. Hamas clings to power in Gaza, still holding 59 Israeli hostages in inhuman conditions. Iran continues to sponsor forces seeking the annihilation of Israel and Jews. Jews are facing an onslaught of hatred around the world.
Yet at the same time, Israel’s government is waging a renewed assault on Israeli democracy. It has resumed war in Gaza, without articulating a coherent strategy and, independent polling shows, against the wishes of the majority of Israelis. We have heard hostage families say they believe their government has abandoned their loved ones for political expediency. One minister said only the other day that “returning the hostages is not the most important thing”. In the West Bank, the government barely disguises (and sometimes boasts of) its role in enabling violent lawlessness. Israel’s standing in the world is being eroded.
Mike Prashker, founding partner of The London Initiative
Israel’s government is leading the country in the wrong direction. It is propped up by extremists, some convicted of terrorism offences, while a majority regard the decision making of its prime minister as driven, not by the national interest, but by cynical political calculations.
No one questions the right of world Jewry to speak up about the external threats Israel faces, about the extent of Hamas’s evil, the forces that back it and the vicious antisemitism of those around the world who support or enable it. We know it is our duty.
Likewise, no one should question the right of world Jewry to speak up about the internal attacks on Israel’s foundational values and, with it, the resilience and future of the national homeland of the Jewish People. World Jewry not only has a right to speak out; it has a duty.
Every Jew, everywhere, is a stakeholder in Israel, and, as the spike in antisemitism around the world on 8 October showed, our futures are interconnected.
In the UK, 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews recently spoke out in a letter to the Financial Times. Their letter has probably not had the impact they wanted – subsequent debate has focused on whether they were right to publish it and how they went about it, rather than the issues raised. There is a legitimate current debate about whether they were right to publish as representatives of British Jews rather than as individuals, whether they should have published it in a UK national newspaper rather than in Israel and why they did not reference the suffering of Israelis from the unprovoked attacks of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Sir Mick Davis, founding partner of The London Initiative
But nothing they wrote expressed a view outside the mainstream of Jewish opinion in Israel or the Diaspora. Indeed, polling by JPR last year revealed that 80 percent of British Jews disapproved of PM Netanyahu, despite a similar number feeling attached to Israel. Among American Jews, Pew Research shows a vast gulf between the high number who support Israel and a far smaller number who support its government.
Loving Israel but being critical of its government is not a minority position amongst world Jewry – it’s a majority.
There is, however, a loud, aggressive minority within the community who attack and seek to silence anyone raising legitimate concerns about Israel’s conduct. They will call you traitors, demented, self-hating or worse. Even when not resorting to explicit incitement, they will attempt to portray you as fringe when it is they who better match that description. And they will accuse you of being divisive – of undermining our “unity”.
But unity is not uniformity. Unity cannot mean an extreme minority dictating to the majority what constitutes an acceptable opinion to express. When the mainstream majority who share the values of the Declaration of Independence – values of Zionism, liberal democracy, societal fairness and the pursuit of secure peace – allows itself to be bullied into silence, we fail in our moral and practical obligations to our community, to Israel and to the Jewish people.
The consequences of speaking truth to bullies are uncomfortable but nothing compared to the risks Israelis are taking for secure peace and democracy.
This government has demonstrated it cares more about its political survival than the lives of the hostages and Israeli soldiers, let alone those of Gazans. Silence constitutes resignation to the fact that many more people, Israeli and Palestinian, will die.
Our silence will also guarantee that the valiant struggle of many Israelis to save Israeli democracy in the face of the judicial coup launched in January 2023 is less likely to succeed. If the government implements its autocratic agenda, Israel will no longer provide the rights to minorities which define liberal democracies and on which Diaspora Jews depend in their own countries. The gap between Israel and the majority of world Jewry will widen further.
Our children are watching, with finely tuned antennae for cowardice, bullshit and hypocrisy, and will notice if the Jewish and democratic values we teach them are riddled with contradictions. If they see us caving in to loudmouthed extremism and doing nothing to advance the “universal” values we claim to hold, we risk alienating future generations from Zionism and the Jewish people.
Earlier this year we established the London Initiative to build partnerships between Israelis, world Jewry and international allies who share a commitment to liberal democracy, societal fairness for all Israel’s citizens and the pursuit of secure peace. Polling shows we are a majority. Yet in public the majority is too often cowed into silence, behaving like an endangered minority when we are in truth an endangered majority. It is time to make our numbers count.
As world Jewry attempts to find its voice, there will be mistakes along the way. But we cannot meander along in paralysed silence for fear of getting it wrong. This Yom Ha’atzmaut let us embrace the urgency of the moment. Let us speak up for the Israel we love in the face of its external enemies, but let us also defend our values and future from those assailing them from within.
- Sir Mick Davis and Mike Prashker are the founders of The London Initiative
