We don’t know each other, though I’ve known of you and your work for some time.  Like many others, I recently read your “How I’m Losing My Love For Israel” in the Forward.  Because you write so articulately, and because your column has attracted such widespread attention, I’m taking the liberty of responding.

The truth is, you and I agree about a lot.  We’re both worried about some of what’s happening to Israeli society.  We’re both tired of all the equivocating (though probably for different reasons).  We’d both love some real leadership around here.  We’d both like peace.  And we’re both exhausted.

That exhaustion is the first reason you give for that fact that your “love [for Israel] is starting to wane.”  But frankly, Jay, when you began to write about your exhaustion, I began to lose you.  For, I have to confess, I don’t see the connection between exhaustion and losing love, or between exhaustion and committing oneself to what’s right and just.

I suspect that the Partisans were pretty exhausted, and they might even have debated some of their own tactics; but those were the least of their problems.  Their main worry was that evil might triumph and transform their world into an uninhabitable hell, and their bone-aching fatigue notwithstanding, they committed their lives to making sure that human freedom survived those who wished to eradicate it.

The GI’s who slogged their way across Europe, up the cliffs of Normandy and across the frozen, bitter winters of that blood-soaked continent, were pretty exhausted, too, I’d imagine.  Yes, many of them were kids, following their orders.  And many of them were probably distraught that innocent Europeans were getting killed by the thousands in the process of saving the west.  But many, I would also like to believe, knew that what they were fighting to preserve was infinitely more important than their own personal exhaustion or the tragic innocent losses that war always entails.  Or even their own lives.

That clarity of purpose was, in the end, why we won, and why you and I live in democracies where we can write and say whatever we like.  Had the Partisans and those GI’s given in to their fatigue, would you and I have the very liberties we so easily take for granted? I doubt it.

So, yes, we’re exhausted.  And, if you’ll forgive me, I suspect that those of here are more exhausted than are those of you over there.  Life here is conducted under a pervasive cloud of exhaustion that my most of American friends simply don’t comprehend.  It’s the exhaustion that comes from coming home at the end of the day and finding on your door a diagram distributed by the Home Front Command showing you how many seconds you have to find shelter if a missile should be aimed your way.  What do you do with that information?  Ignore it?  Or put it on the fridge as the sign instructs you to, so you can live with the looming warning every time you go to get a glass of OJ?

But that’s really the least of it.  The real exhaustion here comes from sending a smart but relatively naïve nineteen-year-old daughter off to the army (in Intelligence, in this case) and have her begin to learn things about Israel’s enemies that she will never be able to discuss.  The exhaustion comes from the hollow look of an unfathomable sadness in her eyes when she’s home, from her bewilderment at the evil of which human beings are capable – an awareness a young woman shouldn’t have at that age.  And you grow exhausted because you want to take care of her, to protect her.   But you can’t.

You can’t take care of your kid because this is Israel.  Because she can’t tell you what she knows.  She can’t talk to you about the human capacity for hatred that she now confronts every single day.  And because this is Israel, you can’t take of her – because here things are reversed.  She’s out there taking care of you.  So you get into bed each night knowing that you’ve sacrificed a part of her innocence and her youth on the altar of your beliefs and ideology, and you wonder, each and every day, if what you once thought was a noble life choice might have been the most unfair thing you ever did.  That, Jay, is more exhausting than I’d ever imagined it would be.

She’s out of the army now.  But her brother’s not.  And there are those days, only once every few months, when I’m either leaving the house in the morning to go to work or coming home at the end of the day, when on the sidewalk outside our building are two IDF officers, and it appears that they’re walking to our entrance.  Then comes that split second moment of breath-stopped horror, the fear that they’re coming to our house, bearing tidings that would be ­wholly unbearable.  It’s only happened three or four times, but it’s enough.  They walk past the building, Jay, barely even nodding to me because they’re in the middle of a conversation, unaware that I’ve even noticed them.  But I’m a mess.  Drenched with sweat.  Shaking slightly.  Knowing that the rest of the day or the evening is going to be a utter waste of time.

And at moments like that, you want to call your kid.  Not for anything in particular; just to tell him that you love him.  That you miss him.  That there really isn’t a moment when you’re not thinking about him, or praying that he’s OK.

But you can’t.  Because he can’t use his phone.  Because he’s busy.  Because he’s out there protecting his parents.  And his brother.  And his sister, who used to protect him.  Simply because when he was a very little boy, we decided we wanted to live here; and now he’s out there, doing this, year after relentless year.  Loving Israel is exhausting, Jay, you’re right.   But really, it’s way more exhausting here than it is over there.

So the real question isn’t whether or not we’re exhausted – lots of us are tired.  (I keep this picture on my desktop for those moments when I feel exhausted … to remind myself that no matter how tired I am, there are people out there (this is not my kid) who are way more exhausted than I am.)  The real question, I think, is not whether we’re exhausted, but rather what we do with our exhaustion.  What makes all the difference is not our fatigue, but what keeps us going when our tank feels empty, when it feels like all that’s left is fumes.

Like you, Jay, I know that I was raised on an image of Israel that doesn’t really exist.  Maybe it never did.  Like you, there were open fields in Jerusalem that I used to love (for you, it was Churshat Ha-Yaraeach) that are now filled by large apartment buildings.  But when we lived in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, our older neighbors used to reminisce about the days when our neighborhood had been all orange groves.  Did they stop loving America because fields got built on?  I didn’t sense that.  When we live in America and watch fields get built up, we sense progress.  But when it’s a field in the Israel of our youth that’s now gone, we feel betrayed.  What’s that about?  Maybe it’s time we all moved beyond puppy love and ventured into something more mature, a sort of love that knows that the object of our love cannot, and should not, remain unchanged year after year, decade after decade.

Like you, Jay, I am concerned about some of the injustices that Israel commits.  But unlike you, I could never be “more relaxed [in Berlin] than in Jerusalem.”  You wrote very compellingly that you felt relieved that though there was political baggage in Berlin, “none of it was mine.”

But you know what I love about this place, Jay?  I love that all the political baggage is mine.  The Palestinians.  The Israeli Arabs.  (Some of) the Haredim.  A collapsing educational system.  Murders on the streets with a constancy we never used to have.  A nation of roads and drivers that kills many more Israelis than our enemies do.  That’s all my baggage.

But living here, my baggage is also the sight of young secular and religious Israelis going from restaurant to restaurant, inspecting not their kashrut, but how they treat their workers, and depending on what they find, giving them a “social kashrut” certificate.  It’s the sight of many hundreds of people coming out to hear Rabbi Benny Lau on the Shabbat afternoon before Yom Kippur in a synagogue that couldn’t begin to accommodate them all, because, they knew, he would be the one guy in the city among all the derashot that afternoon who would tie whatever he was saying to a vision for a different kind of society, and call on them to do something about it.  Living here is about spending a morning on Sukkot, going to the Church in Kiryat Yearim and joining a capacity crowd of Jews and Christians, largely secular but also some people wearing kippot, listening to the choir perform Bach motets on precisely the spot where the Ark of the Covenant once rested.  It’s about the vision of people who, no matter what CNN will tell you, really can live with people who are different from them; it’s about a blending of the ancient past and the complicated present, of setting aside the equivocations of which you write so articulately for a beauty about which you say very little.  Living here is about feeling the pulse of people who still have hope, who desperately want to build something different here, and who would never dream of saying aloud that they’ve given up.

Which is why, Jay, I can’t imagine leaving this place, and angry as I sometimes get, I could never write about losing my love for what we’re building here.  Because I know that this is our last chance, and I know without a shred of doubt that the robust Jewish life that exists everywhere – in Manhattan as well as in Los Angeles, in London no less than in Johannesburg – exists because of Israel.  Two generations ago, Jewish life in America wasn’t the Jewish life that you and I were raised on.  It wasn’t nearly so secure after the war.  And though 1948 made a bit of a difference, the secure and self-confident American Jewish life that you and I take for granted really emerged in 1967, when Jews around the world finally stood tall because they were no longer the objects of history, but were now the shapers of their own destiny.

Would that 1967 war prove to have a very complicated aftermath?  Yes, it would – we’re still trying to figure it out.  But it changed everything, Jay, for me and for you.  For my neighbors and for yours.  I can’t imagine a world in which I’d want to be alive in which this country didn’t exist; which is why I’m constitutionally incapable of saying that I’m losing my love for it.

That’s the real difference between us, Jay, and it’s the reason that your exhaustion leads you where it leads you, and mine leads me to dig in my heels.  You write that as you notice your love starting to wane, you feel a “sadness that accompanies the end of any affair.”

That’s a fascinating metaphor.  Because at the end of an affair, most people put their lives back together by telling themselves that despite the pain of the moment, there will be someone else.  “A lot of fish in the ocean,” we told each other in college when relationships broke up, which was to say, “she’s not the only one out there, and she’s not the last one you’ll love.”

Which may have been true of our youthful relationships back then, but it’s not true of Israel.  This is the only one.  This is the last chance we get.  We lose this, and the Jewish people heads into dark, uncharted territory that I don’t think you or I can begin to imagine.  You yourself wrote that you “still awed by the tkuma, the resurrection and rebirth of my ancient people.”

You’re absolutely right.  This country is the very foundation of the resurrection and rebirth of our ancient people.  Given that, how dare we not love it, even with all its faults?  Is love Israel exhausting?  Of course it is.  Does it require lots of equivocation?  Yes, it does.  Is it very unpopular in lots of circles?  No question.

But it’s bigger than me.  And it’s bigger than you.  It matters more than all of us.  So given that, I don’t think we have a right to exhaustion.  Or, if exhaustion is inevitable, then the only thing I think we have a right to is a few hours of sleep, until we get up the next morning, roll up our sleeves and get to work again.

Because loving Israel isn’t like an affair.  It’s a totally different thing.  In a relationship, the person I love and I both matter – more or less equally, I guess.  But not here.  In this, I don’t matter.  You don’t matter.  Only justice matters.  Only the future matters.  Only the Jewish people’s survival matters.  And without this place, there is no future, no Jewish people.

Given that, what’s the alternative to a deep and abiding love?  I can’t think of one.  So tonight, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and head off to shul.  I’m going to put the news out of my mind, and for a few hours, I’m going to forget about the equivocation, about the fatigue.  I’m going to hold on to my son, the one kid still left at home – and when the singing starts, I’m going to dance.

Shabbat Shalom, Jay, and Chag Same’ach.

Jun. 4, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

Imagine that Germany, embittered by incessant reminders of what happened during the Holocaust, passed a law forbidding German Jews from publicly marking the destruction of European Jewry. Or that the US Congress, tired of hearing Native Americans recite their tales of woe, made it illegal for them to mention their losses on July 4. If Turkey passed legislation like that, directed at Armenian memories of 1915, we would hardly blink an eye. But if a genuine democracy followed suit? We would scarcely believe our ears.

So why are we not more distressed by legislation before the Knesset that would criminalize marking the “Nakba” on Independence Day? What kind of a democracy makes it illegal for a group of its citizens to mark the losses they have suffered? And in what kind of democracy can such legislation be proposed without massive waves of protest?

So why no protests here? Surely, few of us pretend that Israeli Arabs didn’t lose very much in 1948. We know they did. Is it that we’re still at war with the Arab world (unlike America and its native population, for example), or that marking the Nakba is tantamount to asserting that Israel is illegitimate, which we cannot and will not abide?

Perhaps. But we’re also witness to something new. It’s a belief in the ability of hastily written laws to correct problems created by decades of failed Zionist education. For years, Israel has done virtually nothing to even try to inculcate loyalty to the state among parts of its haredi population, Arab communities or a younger secular Jewish generation smack in the middle of the country. But instead of asking ourselves what our children ought to be taught, what they ought to read and discuss during their education, some Knesset members prefer to bury our failures beneath legislation.

Yisrael Beiteinu ran its recent campaign largely on the issue of loyalty oaths, claiming that some Israelis (Arabs, mostly) were insufficiently loyal to the state. It was right about the problem, but wrong about the solution, and the Knesset rejected its proposal. So now, the party has a new issue. Israel, it says, is losing the battle over the Zionist narrative. About this, it is also absolutely right. Once synonymous with the greatest human drama of national rebirth, Zionism today is too often a term of disparagement. A new narrative about Zionism has emerged; in this narrative, Israel is a violation of human ideals, not their realization.

SO WHAT is the proposed response to our failing efforts in the battle to tell our story? Let’s just make it illegal for anyone to tell a competing version.

It would be funny, if it weren’t so frightening. Silencing one’s foes has never been the hallmark of self-confidence.

But what if instead of silencing those who disagree with us, or even hate us, we invested in education? Imagine that we actually cared enough about our own past to try to preserve it and to teach it. “What?” you ask. “Israel has made a virtual art form of remembering the past.” But that is only partially true. We’ve done an extraordinary job of preserving the memory of the Holocaust, but a much poorer job of remembering how we built a country to recover from it.

Now that Israel is more than 60 years old, the people who were instrumental in creating this country are dying at a dizzying rate. In recent days, Shlomo Shamir, the last living member of the 1948 General Staff, and Yehoshua Zetler, commander of Lehi forces in Jerusalem, both died. But how many young Israelis know who Shamir or Zetler were? How many know that Shamir was the only general to have commanded units from the air force, navy and ground forces (on the Iraqi-Jordanian front)? Or that he completed his high school matriculation exams at 55 and went on to university? How many Israelis still know anything about the infamous Acre jail in which Zetler was imprisoned? Very few. But now, it’s too late to record their stories for future generations of Israeli students.

EVEN MORE distressing than how little we know is how little we’re doing to try to remember. For the most part, Israelis have paid no attention to the need to preserve this historic legacy.

One person, at least, is trying. An oleh named Eric Halivni has been working on a project called Toldot Yisrael that aims to record the stories of the country’s founders – the men and women who fought, lobbied, farmed, taught and did everything else necessary in the extraordinary human drama called the creation of the State of Israel. But he, too, is being stymied by Jews’ disinterest in their own history. His hopes of creating a video archive containing thousands of interviews have languished due to lack of funding. With heroic dedication, he’s managed to film about 80 interviews thus far, but that’s not nearly enough.

Scanning his small but precious archive is a history lesson come alive. Who knew that Norman Lamm, later president of Yeshiva University, worked in a bullet factory in upstate New York when he was a chemistry student at Yeshiva College, to do his share to create the Jewish state? Toldot Yisrael filmed Lamm telling his story.

Imagine if young Israelis could watch Miriam Ben-Peretz, professor emeritus of education at the University of Haifa, recalling the morning her then-young husband departed with the lamed heh, never to return. Or Yitzhak Navon, later to become the fifth president of the state, recounting how, as a young man in the Hagana, he monitored the airwaves that night and heard the boasting celebrations of the Arabs who had just butchered the 35 men. Fifty percent of Israeli Jews don’t know who the lamed heh were. What will teach them? The Nakba law or a project like Toldot Yisrael?

Yisrael Beiteinu has inadvertently done us a great service, for the Nakba bill begs us to ask: What is really going to win the battle to right the wrongs in the way that Zionism is now perceived? Do we silence Israeli Arabs who obviously have what to mourn, or instead celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Jews across the globe who believed in the rebirth of the Jewish people, and who then devoted their lives to making it happen?

We all know the answer. The only question is whether we still possess the honesty, foresight and determination that winning our story’s battle will require.

I would have liked many more people to see her.  President Obama, for example, as he prepares for another stab at Middle East peace-making.  Hillary Clinton, who’s now telling us to make peace lest we lose American support in the looming confrontation with Iran.  All those Jews out there, beating their breasts, despondent that the Jewish state is so “un-Jewish” in its seeming unwillingness to make peace.

We hear all those people – of course we do.  And as we do, we can’t help but wonder if the world has begun to tire of us, to regret the decision that it made on November 29, 1947.  (We know without doubt, for example, that were the UN to vote today, Israel would not be created.)  Calls for Israel to negotiate with Hamas despite the latter’s commitment to Israel’s destruction, the poisonous environment of Durban II and the Obama administration’s willingness to engage with Iran even as it continues to enrich uranium, all contribute to this sense.

So to all those who are wringing their hands about Israeli intransigence and inflexibility, on this eve of Israeli Independence Day, a brief word about nations, and states, and purpose.  For without understanding purpose, there’s no understanding Israel.

Israelis elected Ehud Barak in 1999 because he promised peace with the Palestinians.  When Barak put the majority of the West Bank and even parts of Jerusalem on the table, most Israelis went along.  The deal fell apart because Palestinians unleashed the Second Intifada.  The majority of Israelis supported Ariel Sharon’s decision to disengage from Gaza and to uproot all the Jewish communities there.  They even elected Ehud Olmert in 2006, after he ran on a platform of further withdrawal from the West Bank.  How did a country that has continually favored painful concessions for peace end up with Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister respectively?  It is that which Obama, Clinton and all the hand wringers must understand if they have any hope of being heard here.

To appreciate today’s Israeli sentiment, all those people would do well to keep in mind two iconic photographs on which virtually every Israeli is raised.   These images have come to represent two radically different eras – Jewish powerlessness under the Nazis, and Jews at the height of their power, when they captured the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians.

The former period is represented in the minds of many Israelis by a black and white photograph of a Jewish boy, probably no older than nine or ten, dressed in his finest coat and hat, his black dress socks pulled up almost to his knees.  He is the model of innocence, of European-Jewish financial and social success, and yet, he is pitiful – the very picture of vulnerability.  His parents are not at his side, and no onlookers have come to comfort him.  His hands raised high in surrender as a Nazi points a gun in his direction, the boy’s fate depends entirely on the whim and will of his enemies.  He might as well already be dead.

A very different image was taken at the Western Wall in the aftermath of the paratroopers’ conquering of the Old City during the June 1967 Six Day War.   This photo, by David Rubinger, is equally iconic.  It, too, portrays Jews and soldiers – three, in fact.  But now, the Jews and the soldiers are one and the same.  No longer is the Jew the frightened boy looking away from the Nazi’s gun somewhere in Europe.  He is home, in Jerusalem, responsible for his own destiny.

Nothing in this image celebrates war.  The soldiers’ weapons are nowhere to be seen.  Their helmets have been removed.  The figure in the center ­is young, almost boyish.  What captured the Jewish imagination was not the Jew as soldier, but image of a Jew whose existential condition had been entirely altered in the period between those two photos, all because of the creation of the Jewish state.  The Jewish state, Zionism promised, would radically alter the condition of the Jew in the world.  No longer would Jews live and die at the whim of others.  No longer would our children’s safety be dependent on what our enemies decided.

Today, Israelis are concerned that that has begun to change, that we are sliding inexorably back to the reality represented by the first image.  For eight years, Palestinian rockets and mortars turned Israeli childhoods in Sderot and other cities into years of incessant fear.  Thousands of Israeli children studied and slept – and some died – at the whim of Palestinian Kassam-launchers.  And when Israel finally did respond, the world’s outrage was instantaneous.

Now, Israelis wonder if the Americans have quietly resigned themselves to a nuclear Iran.  If Israelis become convinced that that is the case, it will be not Netanyahu or Lieberman, but American policy, which will have caused Israeli intransigence.  For an Iranian nuclear weapon, even were it never used, would reverse the change in the existential condition of the Jew that Israel made possible.   Once Iran has nuclear capacity, every Israeli parent will put their children to bed at night knowing that once again, our survival and that of our children will depend not on what we do, but on what others decide our fate should be.  An Iranian nuclear weapon would represent not only a failure of American deterrence, but the failure of the promise of Zionism, to create and sustain a Jewish state that could keep its citizens safe.

An international community committed to significant progress in the Israel-Arab conflict must first convince Israelis that we are not being abandoned, that the world is committed to the purpose for which Israel was created.  Very few of us relish sending our sons and daughters off to war, to bear for life the scars of battle, or worse.  We, too, would like nothing more than an end to this horrific conflict.  Our voting record proves it.

But as we prepare to celebrate independence once again, one fact must remain clear: we will not end the conflict at all costs.  That is what the international community must demonstrate it understands.  For on this Erev Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, as on all the others, we, at least, know well what is at stake.  Given the choice between sending our children off to fight yet again, or of returning to the world of that first photograph in which someone else will decide if we live and for how long, almost all of us will choose the former.

Mar. 26, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

It’s not every day that your 15-year-old son decides that he wants to hang out with you, so when he makes the offer, you grab it. Amazingly, he suggested that we go to the Biblical Zoo. Not having been there since he was very young, I was happy to oblige.
Toward the end of our few hours there, we happened upon a relatively new exhibit, the collared peccary. With no offense intended, it’s neither especially attractive nor, to my untrained eye, a particularly interesting animal.

But this is Israel, and even the collared peccary was cause for pause. For on this sign, unlike any of the others in the zoo which display Hebrew, English and Arabic, this sign had Hebrew and Arabic in the center, English on the side, and under them all, a brief Yiddish exclamation – “Dos is nisht a chazir.” This is not a pig!! One can chuckle at a sign like that, and say “Only in Israel! Or you can ask yourself what that sign actually reveals about Israeli society.

It means, clearly, that there is a population of Israelis, sufficient in size to merit its own sign, that does not speak Hebrew, English or Arabic, but rather knows only Yiddish. And that population, were it to think that this was a pig, would be very upset. To ensure that no untoward reactions were elicited by this new non-pig, the zoo has assured the haredi population, which visits the zoo in large numbers, that in keeping with Jewish tradition, there are no pigs in this pen.

Am I over-interpreting this? Is the notion that the zoo might be worried what some (yes, only some) of these people would do if they thought a pig were in the zoo far-fetched? I don’t think so. Ask the residents of the Anglo community who live in and near Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet, many of them newly-arrived immigrants, about their aliya experience. Listen long enough, and you will hear of a small but extreme group of anti-Zionist, extremist haredim in that community who are literally terrorizing them.

YOU WILL HEAR the story of the person who received a note in his mailbox saying that a television was observed in his apartment, and that if it were not removed immediately, the writer “could not be responsible for what might happen to your wife and children.” Ask them about Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations in their neighborhood, and they will tell you about the religious customs of this group on Independence Day. They wear sackcloth, they fast and they read Vayechal from the Torah, the portion most Jews read on days of mourning. They will tell you that if you slow down at a traffic circle, the chances are good that one of the small children from this group of extremists will be sent scurrying into traffic to break the Israeli flag off your car.

And the police? Yes, they’re there. They buffer between the two groups to make sure that there’s no trouble. (The police did, however, take down the Palestinian flags that these Jewish extremists had displayed.) Ask these immigrants, who chose to leave America and to raise their children in the Jewish state, about the Friday night not long ago shortly after a haredi mayor was elected there. They will tell you about three religious (but not haredi) teenage girls who were attacked on the street by this group. Two got away, but one was trapped, thrown to the ground, kicked and abused, and it was only when a teenage boy from her own community ran to help her that she was whisked away by a few of the haredi women, taken to their apartment, given clothes and a stroller to make her look haredi, and then accompanied as she was walked home and back to safety.

And the police? They literally said to a friend of mine there: “They all look the same to us. Do you have any idea what do to?” And when names were ultimately provided them, nothing happened. Why? Because at the end of the day, the police know that these Anglo immigrants will cower in fear and watch the values of their homes plummet as others, who are now hearing about this, choose Modi’in and Hashmonaim over their neighborhood. These immigrants will not resort to violence. Not so the extremists, who burn garbage bins and otherwise make it clear that it’s not worth tussling with them.

Someone I know in that community told me this week that they’ve now organized informal patrols to walk their teenage kids on Friday night, so that they can come and go without being molested. It sounds a bit like Europe, doesn’t it? Exactly the condition that Zionism was meant to change, only now it’s happening here, and now the perpetrators are “Jews” (I use the quotes advisedly).

THIS HAS BECOME the season of “loyalty-talk.” It started with the question of the loyalty of Israel’s Arabs to the state – a question that is legitimate, important and extremely complex. But ought we focus exclusively on that one population to the exclusion of others even more open about their objection to Zionism and Israel? What about those who make life miserable for Israeli Zionists? What about the obvious non-loyalty and hostility of some of Israel’s Jews?

Loyalty cuts both ways. Citizens, to be sure, can be expected to show a modicum of loyalty to the democratic state in which they live. The olim of Ramat Beit Shemesh gave up everything to come here, and now many live in fear. There are enemies of Israel who are terrorizing some of Zionism’s best. That’s what the Yiddish sign at the zoo hints at, and what the Ramat Beit Shemesh stories make abundantly clear. And the state is not protecting them.

Who’s failing the loyalty test now?

It’s no secret that you’ve aroused the ire of many, from religious parties on the Right to those on the Left concerned about civil liberties. Ironically, though, your message could easily have appealed to many religious people and to some of those committed to civil liberties. To do that, you would simply have had to craft your message slightly differently, which you still can do.

Let me explain. Ironically, of all the parties that received significant numbers of votes, yours is the only one that made a “splash” about increased civil liberties. How so? You did it by advocating the right to civil marriage. Many people saw this as an anti-religious move, but you could have spun it differently, stressing that despite your commitment to the Jewishness of the State of Israel (to which we’ll return), you endorse the right of citizens to make personal choices about the role that religion will play in their lives. Liberty, you could have said, is the issue.

The same with your promise to reform the conversion process. Even religious people here know that the conversion process has become abominably inhuman. The shameful treatment of Rabbi Haim Druckman last May, and the limbo into which the people he’d helped convert were placed, was inexcusable, but not atypical. You could have appealed to us religious voters, confident as we are in Judaism’s nobility and its capacity to shape lives of Jewish devotion and meaning.

Imagine that you’d advocated change in marriage and conversion not in order to undermine religion, but instead to protect it. What if you’d said “a magnificent religious tradition like ours will thrive most not when it is enforced by a small group of rabbis, but when it is permitted to compete in Israel’s marketplace of ideas.” If you’d said “let’s free religion from the chains of an antiquated rabbinate that allegedly protects it, and enable Judaism to compete for the loyalty and devotion of Israelis by making the best case it can for itself,” you would actually have attracted the interest of many religious voters.

THEN, THERE’S the issue of Arabs. Here, too, a positive campaign would have served you infinitely better. Instead of that “Only Lieberman Understands Arabic” slogan, which led many people to make comparisons between you and Rabbi Meir Kahane, and which drew too many teenagers shouting “Death to Arabs” to your rallies, what if you’d said that only Lieberman is looking at demography honestly?

There’s a basic truth about Israeli society that no one is addressing. For this country to remain both Jewish and democratic, it is imperative that it retain a significant Jewish demographic majority. That’s why all discussions of Palestinian refugees being returned are non-starters.

But as you well know, Palestinian refugees aren’t the only challenge to our democracy. So, too, are the country’s Arabs. If they were to become a larger percentage of the population – no matter how loyal they were to the state – they would by definition undermine Israel’s creation as a country, to paraphrase Lincoln, “of the Jews, by the Jews and for the Jews.” Yes, that is indeed why this country was created, and that does mean that our democracy can’t mimic America’s democracy. (More on this in my new book – I’d be happy to send you a copy.)

So say that the vast majority of people who live here want this to remain a Jewish country. By raising the question of how we’re going to maintain that Jewish majority – by means of moving borders, as you suggest, or by some other means – you could have initiated a conversation that we have put off for far too long.

WHICH LEADS me your “No Citizenship Without Loyalty” slogan. You’re right – the four manifestos by the country’s Arabs which call for ending the definition of Israel as a Jewish state are reason for worry. But what if, instead of oaths, you’d advocated universal national service? For Israel’s Arabs for haredim for the far too many secular Jews who now choose not to serve? What if, instead of being perceived as an alarmist, you’d positioned your party as the one restoring a commitment to patriotism, yes, even for Israel’s Arab citizens?

Oaths of loyalty won’t solve anything. They won’t actually get anyone to serve their state. And they will create a climate of suspicion and fear. Is there an oath that a haredi in Bnei Brak, a secular Jew in Ramat Aviv and a loyal Israeli Arab in Beit Safafa can all utter with complete conviction? I doubt it. That’s why I’d focus less on what people swore to, and much more on what they actually did and how they contributed to the country that you and I both love.

The last thing our country needs is a pervasive climate of suspicion, with commissions asking “who’s loyal and who’s not?” We dare not recreate the trauma that America suffered when Joe McCarthy, who was not wrong about the evil of communism, tore his country asunder by undermining its liberties in the name of saving it.

Israel still has no constitution because as a society, we don’t agree on the fundamental commitments that ought to lie at the heart of the Jewish state. Ironically, your campaign could have been one of the first to raise many of these pivotal issues. Now, with the government still forming, you have another opportunity to craft the message you want to share and the positions you want to advocate.

I, for one, am hoping that we might all still benefit from the campaign you could have run, and now can.