Speak Out

We are now witnessing a small group of people – not many more than Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Rothman and Levin – who have somehow taken over the discourse and the language and claimed the titles for themselves: conservatives, Americans, constitutionalists, heirs of Scalia, and, perhaps stranger still, religious Zionists. That no longer surprises me, but among the protesters the impression has formed that this group has claimed the religious position for itself. Of course, the current religious coalition is utterly different from Bennett’s coalition, the first in which the prime minister wore a kippah. Bennett’s reforms brought investment to the country, and even the Carrefour supermarket chain; the new religious right has brought inflation and capital flight. The Bennett government brought Arab parties into the coalition; Ben Gvir’s election slogan, “Who’s the landlord here?”, hints at a Jewish right to drive Palestinians, and perhaps even Arab Israelis, out of their homes. If anyone had any doubt about what this slogan meant, the repeated attacks on the residents of Huwara, the government’s flat refusal to prosecute the attackers, and the finance minister’s call, Huwara delenda est, put an end to the ambiguity. Videos showing the attackers taking a break for the evening prayer or for Purim dancing have confirmed for many secular people, and for many religious people too, that our religion played a central role in these atrocities.

Hayim Nahman Bialik visited Kishinev after the pogrom. Before the visit he wrote the poem “On the Slaughter”. After the visit he wrote “In the City of Slaughter”, a harrowing poem that describes in graphic detail the atrocities he saw. Every child in Israel studied “On the Slaughter” at school. These poems lie at the root of the traumas that led secular Zionism to found the State of Israel, long before the Holocaust. In the course of the poem, Bialik takes God (and perhaps the Jewish people) on a tour of horrors through the city. At the end of the second stanza, Bialik says to his God:

And you will hold back, and choke the roar inside your throat,

and bury it in the depths of your heart before it bursts out,

and you will leap out of there and leave – and behold, the land goes on as ever,

and the sun, as yesterday and the day before, will squander its radiance upon the earth.

And here we are, 120 years later, and a ruler and his eunuchs incite, lead astray and divide the people. From the days when “the left forgot what it means to be Jewish” to our own days, when every protester supposedly gets 600 shekels per demonstration, the pilots are traitors, the professors are anarchists, women are excluded, and Channel 14 “apologizes” for saying that leftists organized the trains to Auschwitz. Any moment now blood will be spilled; any moment now the troops of the modern Cossacks will charge at protesters, or at the gate of a kibbutz, and blood will be spilled. And when blood is spilled, you will dance on it, just as in 1903.

This week’s Torah portion, Shoftim (“Judges”) – Our society today is on a downward path toward chaos, a path that, to our great sorrow and horror, is being deliberately charted by the government’s ministers and the prime minister. If we desire life, if the state and the culture we have built here are dear to us, and if we do not want agents of chaos acting on behalf of the government to roam the streets and impose the law of the jungle among us, we have no choice but to strengthen with all our might the excellent legal system that we built with toil and talent, to back its decisions, and to give no legitimacy whatsoever to those who declare that they will not obey it. And of the corrupt prime minister, greedy for money and gifts, who works systematically to harm the legal system and ceaselessly legislates personal laws, such as the law allowing him to receive donations for his private needs, one must recite the verse (Proverbs 29:4): “The king by judgment establisheth the land: but he that receiveth gifts overthroweth it.”

The speech that was never delivered, at the protest planned for the evening of October 7

The story I tell begins with the Exodus from Egypt. Then, 3,000 years ago, our people, a people of slaves, rose up and began to walk. And it walked with the message of freedom, equality and dignity for every human being. The three values on which democracy is built. The three values on which Judaism rests. For me, Judaism is a religion, a nation, an identity, but first and foremost my Judaism is also a liberation movement. A movement that, with the Exodus, opened the eyes of the world to the wrong in every social injustice. And on this path, the path of freedom and equality, we have passed many stations. We have moved forward. And Judaism, which has dreamed of freedom since its very first day, must not go backwards.

And here we are, today, in Israel 2023, and equality, the embrace of those who are different, liberalism itself, are all perceived as a challenge to the Jewish identity of the state. As a threat. When the truth is the exact opposite: all the liberal revolutions, from feminism to the Pride Parade, march along the path that the Exodus laid out for us. A path of freedom, equality, dignity. For every human being. So to my religious friends, and to everyone who holds Judaism dear, I say: we are not fighting here against Jewish identity. We are fighting for it. For the Judaism of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, a Judaism that is first to greet each person and—God forbid—does not spit in their face. For the Judaism of Hillel the Elder, which holds out its hand – and heaven forbid, never forces it on anyone.

My struggle is not about Jewish or democratic.

My Israel is Jewish, and therefore democratic.

There are those who were harmed in body or soul; the price they paid is clear. But what about most of those who come back? The majority who were “not harmed”? Tens of thousands of sons, fathers, mothers, men and women, who are left with experiences that changed them forever, experiences most of them never asked for. Asked for or not, they are theirs now. Alongside the tributes, the ceremonies, the clichés and the mythologizing, are we even capable of seeing this price? It is the price paid by every person who has fought for their life, even if they did it “in an orderly fashion”.

We, Israeli society, have once again exacted this price from an entire generation. And what can we set against this price tag? What are we offering this generation in return for its war? In my view, there is only one thing that might perhaps compensate them, and that is for us to bring peace. In fact, we have nothing else of equal value to offer. We have forgotten, but we also owe peace to the fighters of past wars, and we are running up a debt that only keeps growing. We must fight for peace. This must be our promise to the men and women fighting in the current war. Otherwise we have no right to demand this price again.

“Hello, you’ve reached the place for making dreams come true—how can I help?” This is how my son Ori answered his phone. My Oriki was a wonderful person, full of human compassion. He was a 4th year electrical engineering student at Ben-Gurion University, and was working as a bartender at the Nova Music Festival when he was viciously murdered. He was only 29 years old. As a people person, Ori often shared with me his concern about the rift in Israeli society. As an educator, I am also pained by the tears in the social fabric of my beloved country, and wonder how long the ground will continue quaking below our feet. This cursed war did not come upon us in a vacuum, this horrible personal and national breakdown. Our lives have been forever changed since that terrible Saturday.

In my son’s eulogy I wrote that one half of my heart was gone, departed with Ori. I shared my hope that as a liver can regrow a missing lobe, so my heart would regenerate itself. But my heart cannot grow a leadership that this country deserves, which is why I am speaking my mind here today.

This is exactly the right time to demand different leadership… The current government offers no such leadership. Instead, it is plagued by a lack of dignified discourse, a lack of working harmony between its members and its senior officials. Our government has made an ideology of dealing in minutiae, and has drained value-based identities of any meaning.

I want to tell you about the repair, the tikkun, that we made here a month ago in the 2024 local elections. For a year, women and men activists all over the country worked on it. We reached a record number of “zipper” lists across the country: lists in which women are placed in winnable positions, unlike in the past, when women were pushed down to unwinnable positions. And after hard work we succeeded, and there were hundreds of zipper lists across the country. Men and women together. In partnership. Because there is no equality without partnership.

And in these elections, for the first time in the State of Israel, 20 councils were elected with a 50:50 split of women and men council members. In most places in the country there are now more women council members than before. Sadly, this is not the case in Beer Sheva, because not all the lists were zipper lists, and so Beer Sheva is one of the only cities where the number of women council members went down. But despair is not a plan of action, and I hope that the new council, like the other councils in the country, will work to advance gender equality in the city and in the council. Because now is the time. And in the face of this bad government, local government can be a source of repair. Of hope. It is hard to be optimistic these days, but we have no choice: we must try to do good, to be the ones who find the door handle and lead the State of Israel onto a new path. A path of repair.

50:50, a partnership of men and women, is repair.

The key value on which we must base the state is the equality of all human beings. It was in the name of this value that we secured national freedom for the Jewish people; and it is this value that compels the Jewish people’s state to uphold equality of rights for all.

Our ultimate test is the way we treat Arabs, including Palestinians. On the one hand we have the chauvinistic and ethnocentric Jewish Israel, which sees only the catastrophes of the Jews and aspires only for the victory of the Jews. On the other, there is the humanistic Jewish Israel, which sees our sovereignty in our land as the responsibility to achieve equality for all: for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, including the Bedouins; for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank; for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. From the river to the sea, freedom and equality for all.

As the holiday of Passover draws near, let me note that we are commanded to remember that we, too, were once foreigners dependent on the kindness of an alien regime, and afterwards slaves to that same regime. The liberation of the Israelites from Egypt is not just our own national story as Jews, but the foundation for all of humanity’s dream of liberation from slavery, from the Black slaves in the United States to the oppressed natives of Latin America. This is our theology of liberation.

Extinguishing the torch of arrogance – I, Eyal Eshel, father of Roni of blessed memory, husband of Sharon, and father of Yael and Alon, may they live a long life.

Roni of blessed memory served as a lookout and was murdered on Saturday, October 7th, at Nahal Oz.

I extinguish this torch for the sin of arrogance on the part of the political and military establishment.

Next to the flame burning here tonight, which I will soon extinguish, we see great darkness.

A flame that sheds great light on the arrogance that has spread to the highest levels and caused, and continues to cause, all of us, among other things, the grief and pain that we share here tonight. The arrogance of those who saw the system as perfect, immune to criticism and certainly not in need of repair.

I stand here tonight not only to remind all of us of those whose lives were cruelly taken by force, but also to acknowledge failures. The failures of the state’s leadership, of the senior military command, and of the entire system. Years of ignoring warnings, the alerts from the simmering ground, and the signs of distress from all the young women in the Nahal Oz war room.

We are here to say – no more! No more criminal arrogance that will lead to loss of life, no more underestimating the capabilities of the enemy, and no more ignoring the pain and suffering of bereaved families, of which there are so many.

We are here to promise: we will not leave anyone behind.

We are here to commit: together we will build a stronger system, a more attentive society, a society whose mutual responsibility will not allow us to ignore one another.

This torch will be extinguished as a symbol of the sin of arrogance of the government and of the senior IDF command, whose path must also come to an end.

If we do not change our ways, and do not learn from this disaster, we will never find hope again, even after the light has gone out. Let this torch be extinguished so that the State of Israel will awaken.

Lighting the torch of hope – I am Einav Zangauker, the mother of Matan, who has been held hostage in Gaza for 220 days and nights, the mother of Natalie and Shani.

Tonight, I speak on behalf of our people. I insist that we all wake up!

My dear Matan, if you can hear me, I will not stop fighting for your return. With me is your loving family and a large community. Yesterday, I dreamt of you, and I woke up to the nightmare I’ve been living for seven months. What nightmare are you undergoing? You and 131 other citizens, some without mothers to fight for them. We have a people but our country has been abducted. We have amazing people, but no government to guide us.

We will be the pillar of fire that leads the camp. We will be the repair! We who understand that what matters most is life! Human life! The lives of all of us!

Mutual responsibility means the same shared determination to fulfill the commandment to redeem the captives and bring you home, Matan. You and the other one hundred and thirty-one hostages.

I light this torch of mutual responsibility and hope: rescuing the hostages is rescuing the country. Now!

Government of Israel, where are you? Where are you? The hostages are wasting away, the residents of the north are still refugees, the communities in the south are falling apart, towns that have stood since before the founding of the state are being destroyed under daily fire – and where are you? In the second week of October, my friend Yael Shevach and I founded a widows’ squad: more than a hundred veteran widows went from one newly bereaved home to the next, embracing, trying to show women whose hearts and homes had been broken that a day would come when they could breathe again, when the ground would grow back beneath their feet and their children’s feet. More than 300 new widows, more than a thousand new orphans. And who will give us even a pinch of such hope? Who will grow the ground back beneath our feet? How will we begin to heal and learn to breathe again, when our leadership does not want to begin the rebuilding, when our government does not care about us, about our children and our partners who are fighting? A government that did not come to the funerals or to the shiva homes, that left all of us to do its job.

A government that, while we mourn our dead on Memorial Day, keeps promoting the draft evasion of an entire sector.

It was not a failed military conception that led us to October 7th, but rather an illusion: the illusion that we still had a functioning state. The illusion that a functioning society is possible when the different sectors of society live in parallel universes. When the truth of one-half of the public is the lies of the other half. The illusion that we can continue to live with this internal schism. With the corruption. With the rise of messianic Jewish forces. The illusion that democracy can exist in a society that sanctifies Jewish supremacy. The illusion that democracy can be preserved after decades of occupation. The illusion that what we have here is a conflict that can be “managed.” The illusion that just because we can kill together on the battlefield, we can also live together as civilians. The illusion that Israel can coexist with Judea. The illusion that shared symbols, shared rituals and a shared history can continue to bridge over the abyss of opposed values that has opened up between us: the abyss between those who sanctify life, and those who sanctify the Binding of Isaac; between those who sanctify life on earth, and those who sanctify the land itself. The abyss between those who want to be part of the family of nations, and those who believe in “a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.”

I have important news for this government: we will not let you take our hope away. Hope, as we have learned the hard way, is two thousand years old. At the end of this hope, if we work the right way, in three to five years we will be able to see a broad, functioning government that works for the public. A government that will anchor Basic Laws in the legal sphere by broad consensus, that will bring about historic equality in burden and in rights, that will increase welfare for every part of the country and not for one specific sector, that will bring a wave of professional appointments to the public sector, mobilized like an emergency reserve call-up to transform the country’s social services. A government that will return the economy and high-tech to a path of growth. A government that will reach a historic agreement for a regional security alliance with Saudi Arabia and other moderate Sunni states as partners, and perhaps even, despite the terrible pain, a government that will lay the groundwork for ending the conflict between us and our enemies, and thereby return us to the family of nations.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered one of the greatest speeches in history, which later became known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. He had not intended to deliver exactly that speech. He had planned a speech titled “Normalcy – Never Again”. But from the crowd, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin”, and so he did. Eight times he repeated the sentence “I have a dream”, and each time he painted for the crowd a tangible reality in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, on the hills, valleys and plains of America, where Black and white children would play together, where the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners would sit together at the same table, as brothers. He filled the crowd not only with hope but with longing for the reality that those words created in their minds and stirred in their hearts. What has happened to us is that we have stopped dreaming. We have no dream and no vision, and we cannot see the horizon. Our political imagination is limited, at most, to gathering the crumbs of what was taken for granted eight months ago: bringing back the hostages, bringing back the evacuees. These are immensely important things, but they are not a vision for a society that has no way of going back to what was.

I will say it again: there is no way back. Personally, we will not be who we were, and Israeli society will not be what it was. Even if the war ends tomorrow and the government is replaced, we will have to create a security, diplomatic, economic, social, educational and environmental doctrine, and so on, for the new reality. There is no way to create these without a vision. Herzl, the visionary of the state, imagined in Altneuland a light rail in Jerusalem, a promenade in Tiberias, bicycle paths, a scientific research institute, a peace palace for the relief of human suffering, and much more. Not all of it came true, but some of it did! If we do not dream, if we do not will it and believe that it is no legend, then the political imagination of Hamas and Hezbollah, the political imagination of the Ayatollah, the political imagination of Yair and Sara, the political imagination of Meir Kahane will compete with one another to shape the reality here, and might will make right.

We spoke about the duty to doubt. On the other hand, many of us resent Holocaust denial. Doubt in this context is not considered a legitimate expression. We expect a person to check the facts. There is enough testimony and enough documentation. And what about October 7? I assume we have a similar attitude to that subject. I assume that many of us expect that from October 14 on there will be no more denial of the atrocities committed on October 7. But what about the pogroms carried out in the West Bank by settlers under the protection of the IDF, and sometimes with the participation of soldiers? Why are we so tolerant of people who dare to deny the reality in the territories? This has been going on for two years; it escalated when the Lapid-Bennett government came to power, and escalated again when the Ben Gvir government came to power. Why don’t we expect every person to check the facts before denying what is happening under the auspices of the Israeli occupation? Why is the demand to check the facts made only of Arabs, and never of Jews?

We abandoned education, and we got crowded schools and low budgets, while other streams enjoy government immunity. We abandoned education, and our children, Arabs and Jews, no longer know one another, or the culture, the language and the shared story that could connect us. We abandoned education, and we got Ben Gvir in the Knesset, whom our children’s friends vote for, because they do not know how to recognize fundamentalist fascism until it bites them. We abandoned education, and we got a regime coup that sells democracy at half price, with a censored civics textbook. We abandoned education, and we got the abandonment of the hostages in Gaza and of the displaced in the north and the south, because there are people here who buy the lie of total victory. We abandoned education, and that is why there is an entire public here that does not see the lives of the hostages as the supreme value, and as the true victory of Israeli morality.

We abandoned education, and we got children with Messiah patches who recite that there are no innocents in Gaza. These children also think there are no innocents in Wadi Nisnas. But that is over. We have woken up. We know how to educate our children. Our children see us fighting for democracy, for the future of the country; they see us, and that is the best education we can give them. And through us, our children are learning that hope cannot be killed. It is time to take education back into our own hands. As parents and educators, we must bring democracy and equality back into the schools.

We can keep despair at bay, and not give up, and fight for political mental health in our beloved and wounded country. We had a country that had known many disputes but was sane, that was replete with mistakes, but spoke the truth, that was ideologically split, but respected the democratic ideal under which different opinions are not betrayal, but rather welcome ideological pluralism. I want an Israeli mosaic! I want to live within an array of opinions and convictions – both at the Knesset and in Israeli society! Uniformity exists in, and only in, dictatorships.

History proves that people who fought and did not give up changed regimes and systems that seemed as immovable as the planets above us. Discrimination against black people in the U.S. had appeared to be a law of nature, but Martin Luther King started marching to Montgomery and that law changed. Marching with him was Rabbi and Philosopher Heschel, and when he returned to his hotel room he wrote: “Today, I prayed with my feet”. And they were not the only ones to pray with their feet. Mahatma Gandhi freed his people, against all odds, from occupation and oppression. Playwright Theodor Herzl did not call himself a visionary but rather a delusionist, yet it is thanks to him that we are here. So no one will ever convince me that the horrific reality this government has placed us in cannot be changed. We will not despair.

Silence. That’s what we need. And not just for one minute. We need months of silence to train our ears to listen to the faint heartbeat of a dying nation. To the whispered prayers of the hostages and their families, whose world stopped on October 7th. And the needy, the beaten, the mourners, the wounded, the disabled, the displaced from their homes, and the refugees in their own land. Silence. Turn off all the televisions in the country, silence eager reporters, hush hollow commentators, and muzzle corrupt politicians. And once and for all, shut Benjamin Netanyahu’s mouth. Stop the flood of lies pouring from his mouth and poisoning our world. He is the man who, for twenty years, has strengthened Hamas and padded it with tens of millions of dollars. He is the man who led the judicial coup that bled the Israeli nation dry and weakened its resilience. He is the man who continues to lead us in a war that has broken away from its origins and where it leads – nobody knows. He is the man kept in power by our soldiers’ death. He bears full and absolute responsibility for the October catastrophe. The wheat may grow again – but if we do not rid ourselves of Netanyahu, no one will be left to harvest it.

And now, I shall talk about hope. Hope is not just a melancholic song that we turned into an anthem. Hope is not something you wait for. Hope is not something you pray will come. Hope, even if it is not yet lost, will not spontaneously emerge. Hope does not knock on the door. Hope – to quote from Deuteronomy – is brought by signs, wonders, and war, with a mighty hand and an arm stretched forth and terrifying manifestations of power.

We work for hope. We sacrifice for hope. We courageously fight to realize hope.

We are hope. All those who turn up over and over again for the protests, on the bridges, in convoys, and in traffic blockades. They are the sparks of hope, and if all the skeptics, cynics, and fence-sitters join us, the sparks will unite in a great flame. A bright light will shine over this glorious land, and together, we will rebuild it from the ashes.

On October 7, my world shattered. My firstborn and beloved son, Lieutenant Yanai Kaminka, aged 20, was killed in the battle for Zikim, abandoned to the failed conception, fighting heroically with an M16 and dwindling ammunition against Nukhba fighters well equipped with grenades and RPGs, who choked the life out of his young body.

But the loss is not mine alone. Yanai and the others who were slaughtered on that cursed day were the next generation of leadership of the State of Israel. And Yanai thought a great deal about leadership in his short life. I want to share with you the command values he wrote during his officers’ course:

Value 1: Love for the soldiers, and making them feel loved – From the very first second he receives his soldiers, a commander must decide that he loves each and every one of them, without exception. There is no such thing as a commander who loves a particular soldier less because of his character or because the soldier is difficult... Loving your soldiers is like a muscle, and if you train it enough you will manage to love them all... Even if you are angry with a soldier, or disappointed in him, or punishing him, the soldier should know that you, as his commander, love him. Value 2: Responsibility – Every person in the platoon, and everything that happens in the platoon, is under my full responsibility. Whether it is their situation at home or anything that happens on the base, I take responsibility for everything.

Responsibility, love and care for the people in your charge, seeing the other... values that have vanished from the sight of the arrogant tyrants who are dismantling the State of Israel. There is no need to elaborate... the abyss is plain for any sensible person to see.

We are in a terrible war, not only against our enemies but above all over the character and values of Israeli society, over our future as a Jewish and democratic society, and over the vision of the prophets of Israel and of the founding fathers and mothers of the Zionist movement. There must be clear limits to racism and hatred, and without a clear, positive, values-based alternative from us, the educators, young people will be drawn to places that offer quick answers to their existential anxieties, to their fears, and to the impulse of xenophobia and fear of the other that is ingrained in all of us.

Israel has a state education system founded on the Declaration of Independence and the State Education Law. We must not hesitate to send educational messages that are sometimes complex, but clear. Our children live in a confusing era ruled by lies, flattery and fakery, and they are crying out for meaning, for dialogue, for connection and for boundaries. We must not stand aside.

Everyone who holds the values of Zionism and Judaism dear, and certainly those of us who work in education, has a duty to say out loud: violence, racism, religious zealotry and hatred are not the ways of Judaism, for “her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace” (Proverbs 3:17). We must begin the work of repair at once. Education is the way, the community is the proper setting for the educational act, and peace, justice and freedom for every human being are the proper purpose of education and community.

Education is a political act whose role is to shape the character and values of the generation of the future. We must not be frightened by the trap of distinguishing between legitimate political education and state-sponsored ideological education. Expressing an opinion or a position in support of the values of human rights and social justice is an educational duty that must not be betrayed.

Hello everyone! Good evening! Marhaba. My name is Miriam Tarabin Abu al-Qi’an, and I am here from the village of Umm al-Hiran, which has already been demolished, as you heard last week. The story of the village goes back 70 years. They took us from our lands, brought us to this place and told us: live here. And since then we have had no right to build, no right to be connected to water, no right to be connected to electricity. We live in an age when people have already reached the moon, and we still boil water over a fire to bathe our children. And in the end, after 70 years, the state decided: that’s it, you are leaving, you are trespassers. But we are not trespassers; it was the state that brought us to this place, from our original homes. As a woman I suffered, and the women there suffer the most. I hold a master’s degree and I am a teacher by profession, so we are educated people, living a simple way of life, living as if in the Middle Ages, even though we live in the most advanced era in the world, because the state does not want to give us the basic right to infrastructure, while every day it sets up new settlements. They are moving us out to bring in the Dror community, who are settlers with a destructive ideology, like the ideology of Ben Gvir and Smotrich and Netanyahu and all that. This is truly leading us to disasters we do not want, disasters not only for some of the people. The disasters come upon all of us, and that is why this government, which lives by bloodshed, must be stopped. The hostility, the wars, everything that is evil and destructive – it really must stop. We are citizens of the state; we must receive our rights just as we fulfill our obligations, and the state must recognize this and not treat us as third- and fourth-class citizens. And I hope that we will finally move this issue forward and stop this destructive government. Thank you.

Tonight, in these dark, painful and despairing days, I ask all of us to reclaim another symbol that has drifted away from us in recent years: hope.

As long as, deep in the heart, our soul still yearns, beats and seeks good, for us and for all the women and men who live here, without distinction, our hope is not yet lost.

As long as our eye still looks toward Zion, seeking to see in it a symbol of peace and brotherhood among nations, our hope is not yet lost.

As long as we hold on to the aspiration to be a free people in our land, a quest for freedom that comes with a readiness to act, to make things good here, our hope is not yet lost.

The Hebrew word for hope, tikvah, comes from kav, a line. A line that connects us, all of us. We who have lived for years under a leadership that splits and divides us for the sake of narrow interests.

Hope awakens when we are together, points on the line of the horizon, loops in the fabric of life, connected to one another, from the very knowledge that we are on the same side. Women and men who desire life and peace.

Tikvah also comes from mikveh, a gathering of water: drop by drop we will gather together, small lights seeking to rise together, to shine together, from the cracks of our broken hearts. Hope is usually pictured as the expectation of a good future. That is a problematic definition, because we are not spectators on the sidelines; we have been dragged against our will into a terrible reality that grows darker by the day. We do not have the privilege of expectations.

Yehuda Amichai wrote that hope must be like barbed wire to protect us from despair; hope must be a minefield. A minefield, so that we do not fall into illusions. No one will do it for us; it is we who must repair, rise up, shout, demand.

Dear friends, in the calendar of our disasters, this date, the fourth of January, holds an especially prominent place of disgrace and shame. On this day the new justice minister, his face full of hatred and satisfaction, announced his intention to commit indecent acts against our democracy and to maim the legal system, intentions that before the elections had been hidden in the darkness befitting them, deceiving the public.

And since then we have been here every Saturday night, while around us and within us disaster follows disaster, while the unbelievable and the unthinkable become the reality of our lives. Since then we have watched in horror as terrible crimes unfold before our eyes, chief among them the appalling crime of abandoning the hostages, under the rule of the government of malice and disgrace, conducted by Mr. Abandonment, who has filled our calendar with days of disaster and emptied it of days of joy. Who has filled the cemeteries with new graves and emptied tens of thousands of homes of consolation. Who has filled the land with lies and blood libels and emptied it of the values on which it was founded. Who is emptying the state’s coffers and the pockets of the public that carries the burden, and is already emptying the land of its finest people, who are not willing to live under a dictatorship and to offer up their sons as burnt offerings on the altar of his continued rule.

Carmel Gat is not standing in the square. Carmel Gat does not feel the rays of the winter sun. Carmel Gat does not tell herself: how lucky that I didn’t forget my sunglasses, that I wore a thin shirt. Carmel Gat is not dazzled by the pale paving stones. Carmel Gat does not watch the little family walking in classic composition – father, mother and a little girl in the middle – and think, how sweet; nor the elderly couple, with no sense of style, carrying coffee to go and bags of pastries. Carmel Gat does not tell herself: soon, when they sit down in the spot they are striding toward so determinedly, they will be boiling hot, they will peel off layers. Carmel Gat does not wonder whether the free male arm now reaching out to hug the woman’s shoulders expresses tenderness or control. Carmel Gat does not decide to look the other way, toward the sunken garden. Carmel Gat does not follow with her eyes someone carrying two clumsy yellow plastic chairs down there. Carmel Gat does not ask herself when yellow will go back to being an ordinary color, or how many of the many people who left their homes for the square give it a thought. Carmel Gat does not try to read on their faces how many of them slept badly last night.

Bas ihna ma nuskut. We will not be silent. Binihki b’sot ‘ali. We are speaking out.

At the root of all this stands something we must call by its name: Jewish supremacy. From the political persecution at Ben-Gurion University to the ruins of Gaza, from the government’s criminal budgets to the Oscar-winning film, the shameful conduct of the racist Beer Sheva municipality, the continuation of the war and the sabotaging of the deal, the terrible tragedies of this war – all of them are the result of Jewish supremacy. So too the demolition of homes in the Negev and in East Jerusalem, the expulsions. We are in a wave of hatred, religious extremism, violence and racism.

And in the midst of all this we stand together. We know what is right. Bni‘raf innu al-muhimm ishi huwe al-hayah: we know that what matters is life. We are steadfast and we will not change, we will not turn into rhinoceroses, we will not be silent and we will not fawn over power. I would like to sing “We are not afraid” now, like we used to. Shall we try together?

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described a tyrannical regime as one in which acts of absolute arbitrariness are carried out under the appearance of absolute law and legality – and that is exactly what is happening here: a budget that abandons those who serve, the workers and the weak is called “the reservists’ budget”; ministers do not show up for questioning over a break-in at a military base; the Qatar investigation is explained away as a “deep state plot”. This is what a gang in power looks like.

At the same time, Kahanism and the criminal idea of Jewish supremacy are no longer on the margins; they are thriving as a ruling ideology that spreads hatred, empties democracy of its content, erases the fundamental value of the sanctity of human life, and worst of all, Kahanism produces Jewish terrorism:

today against Palestinians in the West Bank, tomorrow against Israel’s Arab citizens, and the day after against anyone who does not fit this minority regime. That is the big picture.

On Sunday, October 8, a year and a half ago, at 7:45 in the morning, I had to open the morning meeting of the cardiology division at Carmel, as I do every morning. All through that cursed Saturday I thought about how I would do it, in a department where doctors, nurses and paramedical staff, Jews and Arabs, work together, as in every hospital in the country.

I said that in the face of the terrible atrocities of the day before, in the face of the absolute evil that does not distinguish between Jews and Arabs, between women, babies and the elderly, we can do only one thing: carry on together, Jews, Muslims and Christians, doing only good for the patients who turn to us for help, regardless of religion, race or sex.

And that is what we did, we and all the other hospitals in the country. In days ruled by chaos, anxiety and insecurity, when trust in the government and the army had been lost, in days when the countless government ministries fell silent, Israel’s health system worked tirelessly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and was one of the only anchors and islands of sanity.

This year I did not hang a flag, not on my balcony and not on my car. May the flag forgive me, may the values it embodies forgive me, values that are all integrity: love of humanity and of the land, morality and commitment, the sanctity of life. May the flag forgive me, and may my beloved country forgive me.

Lately it is also hard for me to sing HaTikvah. I mumble the words, more precious to me than gold, without the melody. This difficulty shakes my world to its core. I, who as a child always stood up at the sound of HaTikvah when the television broadcasts ended, with the flag waving proudly on the screen... It was a standing of pride, of respect. Imagine a girl, and later a teenager, standing up in the living room because HaTikvah is playing on television. That is how patriotic a Zionist I was. The Zionism I grew up on, and in whose values I was raised, was religious Zionism. I am a graduate of a state-religious elementary school and of a girls’ ulpana. I truly received an excellent education, but something along the way went a little wrong, turned into something else. This flag of my beloved and torn country, the one that symbolizes values of commitment and human dignity, has been stained today, stained with the blood of many hundreds of people who were abandoned to their deaths in the communities around Gaza, in the cities of the south and at the nature parties: civilians and soldiers, young and old, women and children. This flag has been stained by the pain of the hostages’ parents, of the living and of the dead, who lift their eyes in prayer to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and his ministers, hoping that their hearts will soften and their priorities will change, so that the sanctity of life will take first place on the scale of values.

I can tell you: Gaza has never been an existential threat to the State of Israel! On October 7 we were first and foremost victims of Israeli hubris, which insisted on deceiving itself. But the Israeli mainstream – which in plain Hebrew means our friends, our neighbors, our family – believes there is no other solution. That we are in survival mode, where the rules change and morality must be put aside for a while. “We’ll see later.” There is no joy in that statement. I see them lost, confused, and traumatized. We are living in a sad and tragic time for all sides. War has always been, and will always be, a terrible thing. We were born deserving of grace, and grace is exactly what is missing now. And every time a blast shakes the house, when doors slam and windows rattle, I understand more clearly that those who do what they are doing mean it to be irreversible. And I realize that neither I nor anyone else in Israel can escape it: this irreversible act will come back to haunt us, one way or another.

And how can we rebuild the State of Israel like this? How can we rebuild Be’eri? I sense a looming catastrophe, as we did during the judicial overhaul – not knowing what awaited us on October 7.

So, enough! We cannot go on one minute longer. We have gathered here tonight, a broad coalition of organizations, to say clearly: we will not allow this to go on. We will not stay silent, and we will not stop – until this war of annihilation stops, until the government of death is gone.

We deserve better than this! My people in Gaza deserve to live! The children there deserve to play! And all of us here deserve to have a just, egalitarian, truly democratic country, where we are all the rightful owners. We deserve it – and we will make it happen! We have gathered here tonight because we all know: the time is up. We can no longer keep our eyes closed; there are no more excuses or mitigations. When unforgivable crimes are being committed in Gaza, when inside Israel the government is doing everything it can to turn its rule into a dictatorship, when it is clear that for them the war is here to stay and the lives of Palestinians – and Israelis – are worthless, we cannot stay silent. And we have to understand: it is our responsibility to make all this stop!

I want to share with you a mother’s moments during such a long war: the moment my son comes back from the inferno of war for a short weekend at home. I empty his bag next to the washing machine. Everything fills with powdery dust, and a terrible smell comes out of the uniform after long weeks without a shower. And no, it is not the ordinary smell of sweat and dirt, or of gun oil… it is a smell that sends a shiver through you, and even three rounds in the washing machine don’t help. A smell no mother should have to smell in her child’s clothes. But you smile to yourself, because it means he is home, that this time he came back to you.

Then Sunday comes and you make him homemade sandwiches. He makes coffee for the road and you drive him to the pickup point, from where he goes back to Gaza. And the whole way you are thinking about where to make a U-turn, and which doctor you could find to write him a sick note, maybe you could bump into a wall, just lightly… just to give him one more moment of home and keep him safe with you a moment longer. He gets out slowly, as if to stretch the time, and you hug him tight and whisper in his ear, “Remember who you are... always remember who you are.”

When we hear media figures in prime time speak about the war and about a hierarchy of pain, we are confronted with a chilling reflection of the loss of moral compass. The ability to empathize only with one side, to see humanity only on one side – this is not just emotional numbness. It is human hypocrisy that differentiates between a Gazan child and an Israeli child, between a starving hostage and a starving infant. This war is burying all of us – Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. Hostages, civilians, and children. The pool of blood keeps expanding, and despair is deepening. If we open our eyes, we will realize that this is a catastrophic stage in a continuous deterioration of democracy, already evident in the abandonment of minorities: the Nation-State Law that guarantees Jewish supremacy, the non-recognition and destruction of Bedouin villages in the Negev, attempts to oust Arab MKs, the promotion of silencing laws, and the continued persecution and intimidation of anyone who dares to voice protest and opposition.

Rabin’s legacy is complicated for us, the Arab citizens. It includes painful chapters too. Rabin was first and foremost a military man. But we remember Rabin because he had a courage rarely seen in politics: the courage to change. With courage he changed direction in the conflict, and changed direction in relations between Jews and Arabs. At an election rally in Nazareth he apologized for years of discrimination and promised change. His government of peace came into being thanks to a historic partnership with the representatives of the Arab public. Young Arab women and men entered senior positions in the civil service for the first time. This was not a favor. It was a worldview. A vision of real democracy, one that includes all its citizens. This is the courage we miss, and this is the courage we need today too.

I am here to tell the truth, a courageous truth that Rabin understood and took to heart: a government of repair cannot exclude the representatives of the Arab public! Democracy is strong only when everyone is equal! Democracy is strong when there is no occupation!

And democracy is strong only when everyone, all of us, is safe. And that includes the towns in the Triangle, the Negev and the Galilee. Friends, we are not the threat – we are the opportunity. We are the speakers of two languages, of two cultures, of two pains and two dreams. We can be the bridge that connects, but a bridge connects only if both sides dare to step onto it. I ask you to reach out a hand. Not as a concession, but as an act of courage. Let us be the generation that stops being afraid and starts building. Let us imagine a reality in which children from Ra’anana and Tayibe, from Lod and Ramallah, from Tel Aviv and Gaza grow up not on fear but on hope. It is in our hands.

In March 1995, Yitzhak Rabin gave a speech at the memorial ceremony at Kibbutz Tel Hai. From among the ruins of another kibbutz, my kibbutz, Nir Oz, I take Rabin’s words and carry them over, adapting them to these days and to our reality, thirty years later. The story of the tragedy and heroism of the Gaza border communities has been known in Israel for two years now. There is no child in Israel who does not know the story of the Gaza envelope, and within it, of Kibbutz Nir Oz. The story of its members who were brutally murdered, and the story of the heroism of the members of the kibbutzim, the development towns and the moshavim, in the hours when the Nukhba terrorists captured the communities and help was slow to come. There have been greater acts of heroism in the history of the Land of Israel. There have been wars of no choice and wars of choice, and thousands were killed, but the story of Kibbutz Nir Oz embodies the hold on the land, the pioneering spirit, settlement and security.

The story of Nir Oz and the Gaza envelope is the essence of our story! For seventy years we have been living this story and marching with the last words of Joseph Trumpeldor, “It is good to die for our country.” Generations of fighters were raised on these words. It is a testament whose painful fulfillment is sadly borne out by the military cemeteries throughout the country. And I say to all of us today: if there is no choice, if a sharp sword lies on our necks, if the danger to our existence is beyond measure, as it was on October 7, if everything hangs in the balance – there is no choice, we go into battle, we go toward the loss of life. But I say, “It is good to live for our country!” Death and bereavement are not a decree of fate, nor a decree from heaven.

The strategy for saving democracy is clear to any sensible person. We need a turnaround. We need to form a government that does not depend on the goodwill of the settlers: a partnership government that includes the Arab parties. Without Jewish-Arab partnership there will be no halt to the regime coup, no end to apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and no democracy. A partnership government is the antithesis of a “unity” government. As each of us knows, in Orwellian Hebrew the word “unity” means “without Arabs”.

The slogan of Academics for Israeli Democracy is that there is no academia without democracy, and the general slogan of the protest should be “There is no democracy without partnership”. I must admit that until two weeks ago I thought the chances of uniting around this slogan were slim, but then a poll was published, and it turned out that most voters of the center and left parties believe that Jewish-Arab partnership in the next government is the call of the hour. So perhaps there is hope for us after all.

Israeli academia, for me, is a series of moments of grace. When I sit with a brilliant doctoral student who is developing a new, groundbreaking theory. When postdoctoral researchers from the best universities in the world come to join my research group, not because they are paid more here, but because there is freedom of thought, creativity and intellectual challenge here. When, on my way to lunch, I pass a study group on the lawn, women and men students from every sector and every identity, sitting, studying and laughing together. When, in my field of research, Israel is ranked second in the world, not per capita, but in absolute terms. And when I stand in front of a class of 300 students who have come to learn discrete mathematics – Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, women and men – and what they all share is the spark in their eyes when they grasp another small piece of the endless beauty of mathematics. But these ideas, these moments of grace, can arise only in a certain political climate: a climate that encourages free and independent thinking, in which there is no fear. A climate that allows new ideas, however different, to be raised, criticized, questioned, to fail and to be tried again. This is the natural selection of human knowledge, the evolution of science and knowledge. And such a process is possible only in liberal democracies.

This day, February 14, is not only Valentine’s Day; it is also the day on which, 77 years ago, the First Knesset convened for the first time as the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to draft the constitution. And this constitution is not a mere formality. The constitution we still long for is supposed to translate moral values into a set of legal rules. The constitution is meant to make clear what in normal times should be self-evident: the duty of the governing authorities to act in accordance with the values of liberal democracy, in the public interest, with a commitment to equality and the other human rights.

Against this background, the war that the current Israeli government has declared on the rule of law is entirely an attempt to shake off the values of the state. The attempt to appoint judges and legal advisers who will do the government’s bidding, the prime minister’s demand for personal loyalty from every office holder in the public service – none of these is an attack on some abstract, theoretical idea of the rule of law. It is an attack on the public itself, on our rights, on our ability to live in well-being, on our lives.

And that is exactly what this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim (“Laws”), is about: a portion that connects the sublime moment of the giving of the Torah, a moment of thunder and lightning, with the laws that govern the everyday life of people and society. It is a connection meant to remind us that the rule of law and a constitution are entirely practical matters, matters of life itself.

Evening 868 since the massacre of October 7, and the government of failure has still not taken responsibility, and a state commission of inquiry has still not been established. When I heard Minister Miki Zohar say last week that we are not a country where massacres happen, I boiled with rage. And I want to ask Minister Zohar from here: what do you call the moment when my family sits in the safe room surrounded by terrorists, gunfire on every side and then a paralyzing silence? Wondering whether everyone has been murdered or kidnapped, and what their fate will be. Asking again and again where the army is, and whether we have been conquered? And there is no answer, and no one to save them? That is called a massacre, Minister Miki Zohar; that is called abandonment. And what will Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say, when in real time, on October 7, a member of Be’eri’s rapid response team spoke with him, described the situation and called for help? Perhaps the prime minister and Minister Zohar were at an “event” – but in Be’eri and in the communities of the western Negev there was a massacre and there was abandonment. I return to the truth and to the facts, against everyone who tries to deny them: in the October 7 massacre more than 1,200 civilians and soldiers were murdered. Including my parents, Orit and Rafi Svirsky, including my grandmother’s caregiver, including my partner’s aunt, and so many people who made up my private history. But there was not only a massacre; there was also abandonment. For hours on end, entire communities, families and children, were left alone in the face of Hamas’s cruel evil. The State of Israel did not protect them. And it did not end that day. There was also the ongoing abandonment of 255 hostages, when 46 of them, including my brother, who should have come back alive, were killed and murdered in captivity. And others who were abandoned to ongoing abuse for so many hours, days and months... Today we know that they knew the hostages were being abused, and still they left them there. This we will not forget, and this we will not forgive. We know that things could have been different here, if only saving lives had been put before the seat of power and revenge.

An emergency conference, “The North Demands: Enough of the Eternal War!” – We are all victims of a bad leadership that does not see human beings, only subjects. They provide no protection, yet they demand that we not leave our communities, even though we have no proper means of protection. This is the horrifying reality of an illegitimate government that drags us from one cycle of bloodshed to the next. A straight line runs from the neglect of the residents of the north to the neglect of the residents of the Gaza envelope. In the north and in Gaza alike, a great many things could have been done to prevent war. There is someone to talk to. There is someone to make agreements with. Many Arab states will make an agreement with Israel if there is an agreement with the Palestinians. Did the Israeli government try to adopt the Saudi initiative, which would have brought many peace agreements between Israel and the Arab states? Certainly not. But arming the militias of Jewish terror in Samaria – that they know how to do very well. Arming the crime organizations in Arab society so that we kill one another – that they certainly know how to do. It is the same government and the same prime minister, who has been busy for years with what he personally will get out of every decision. What the political gain will be. Even in wartime he finds time for petty politics, but dealing with Jewish terror – that he doesn’t know how to do. Dealing with crime that never stops – he doesn’t know how. Providing protection for the residents of the confrontation line and for the 200,000 Bedouin citizens in the unrecognized villages of the Negev – he doesn’t know how.

The Fourth Lebanon War is the continuation of the Second Iran War, which is the continuation of the total and inhuman destruction of the Gaza Strip and of settler terror in the West Bank. For Netanyahu and the far-right government, what is on the agenda is an eternal war, a war without end.

I, David Harel, son of Aharon Harold and Joyce née Fish, light this torch in honor of progress, in honor of science and the spirit, in honor of independent education and culture, and in honor of justice, freedom and equality. All this, so that we may live in a strong and advanced, democratic, liberal and peace-seeking state.

As one who immigrated to Israel from England as a child, the son of a family that combined academic research with deep Jewish faith and true Zionism; as a graduate of a yeshiva high school, and as one who fought as a company commander in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, and three of whose grandchildren have been fighting on various fronts since October 2023; and above all, as one who has had the privilege for half a century of being at the heart of the world of science, in Israel and around the world – from all of these I have learned the importance of Israel’s scientific, spiritual and security strength. This strength, the message it conveys to the world, and its significant contribution to all of humanity, must rest on the fundamental liberal and universal values of full equality of rights, and of freedom, justice and peace. Therefore, all who uphold these values must join forces to fight the foolish attempts to undermine them.

We have no right to stand idly by, and we cannot remain silent!

A quotation from the Declaration of Independence:

“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”

I light this torch in honor of those whose work brings progress to all the residents of the state, in all its communities; and in honor of those fighting for a Jewish, democratic and liberal Israel that lives in full peace with all its neighbors, and for the glory of the State of Israel!

We can keep sinking into despair, or we can choose to act. Together, in life and with our shared strength. I want to say one more important thing here: this struggle is not only the struggle of Arab society. This struggle belongs to all of us; it is a struggle for life itself. It is a struggle for the right to come home safely. It is a struggle to raise our children without the fear and helplessness that they will go out and not come back.

The truth must be told: the coming elections will be decided in Arab society. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If we keep reaching out a hand for real partnership, listening, understanding, seeing the pain and not only using it, there will be a turnaround here. If we know how to build real trust, not out of a passing interest but out of a deep recognition that we were all born equal, we can change reality.

If we work toward partnership out of equality, without demanding that the other side give up its values and its identity, out of recognition and not out of superiority, it will be a real partnership. A partnership of human beings who understand that our fate here is shared. I, Nidal Masalha, believe in such a partnership. A real partnership. An equal partnership.

Yesterday I realized that the LGBTQ community is a sign and a marker. It is a marker of values that are disappearing under this government. And not by chance, because someone has a reason for this to happen. The LGBTQ community is a marker of the acceptance of the other. You here in Haifa are a city that is a model and an example of this value, even if there is still more to fix and to do. The LGBTQ community is a marker of love of the other, of understanding and embracing what is different, whoever is not me. Go tell that to the minister of no-education, who deploys undercover agents to check what education workers say when they criticize him and the government. The LGBTQ community is a marker of the absence of regimentation, of going against the current, of thinking and acting differently from the norm. And as long as it does not harm anyone else, that is fine. Go tell that to the minister of no-national-security: just last Thursday we saw what happens when you demonstrate but your leaders are members of the coalition. And we need to show it and shout it and mark these values in the public space. Because this space is ours too. It belongs to all of us who hold true liberal values.

“About 40 hostages were killed in captivity – we could have brought them back alive.”

“The war in Gaza could have ended at least a year before it did, with the same achievements.”

“The leadership could have advanced hostage deals, and it did not.”

These things were said yesterday by Nitzan Alon, the former head of the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters. He knows every step and every junction on this road, which went on for far too many days and cost the lives of so many hostages. He was there when decisions were made, when other decisions were not made, when hostage deals were torpedoed.

What we screamed in the streets, warned about at the gates of the Kirya, and said in tears in meetings with cabinet members, Nitzan Alon is now saying outright and as publicly as possible. Nitzan Alon is telling the truth. It is a truth that is hard to digest, unbearable for me, but it is so important that it is being said, because truth has value, and recognizing what happened has value, even if it comes too late for our families.

In exactly one hundred days, the State of Israel will not just go to the polls. In one hundred days we will decide what kind of country we want to be. A country that runs away from the truth, or a country that looks it straight in the eye. I stand here tonight, in Haifa, after one of the most turbulent weeks Israeli democracy has ever known. A week that reminded all of us that it is not only the borders of the state that we must fight for.

We must also fight for the boundaries of morality, of responsibility and of truth. Almost three years have passed since October 7. Thousands of families are still waiting for answers. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis still carry that cursed Saturday in their hearts, and a huge hole in their hearts. And there is still no state commission of inquiry. Not because there is nothing to investigate, but because there are those who fear the truth. But a disaster like this cannot end only with monuments, memorial ceremonies and speeches. A disaster like this must end with the truth.

Because a country that does not investigate the greatest failure in its history endangers its future. And whoever does not learn from failure invites the next one. In one hundred days, every ballot we put in the box will be much more than a vote for a party. It will be an answer to a fundamental question: are there people in the State of Israel who are above responsibility? Can citizens be abandoned, soldiers be abandoned, entire communities be abandoned, and then everyone simply carries on as if nothing happened? I refuse to accept that, and I am sure you do too. I refuse to believe that this is the country we grew up in, that we dreamed of, and for which we sacrificed what is dearest to us.

I grew up in a home whose foundation is love of humanity. A home of medicine, education and the soul: my father a doctor, my sister a doctor, my mother an educator, my sister a psychologist, and I chose a wife who is a psychologist. We grew up on deep values of accepting the other, on the ability to get up every morning anew with a mission to help every person, whoever they may be, regardless of religion, color, race or nationality. This culture and this giving are what characterize Arab society, even when, again and again, the media and public discourse try to paint a different, distorted picture.

Today, about 40% of the medical staff in Israel are Arabs, and this figure attests to the high-quality and significant contribution of our society to the fact that Israel has an advanced health system, one of the best in the world. That is why I stand here tonight and say in the clearest possible way: I have not come to apologize, and I have not come to justify my Arab identity, of which I am proud.

Eradicating racism is not the possession or the task of Arab society alone. The fight against it must be first and foremost the fight of the Jewish majority. Racism has lately been growing in the backyard of Israeli society, and the majority has a moral and civic duty to root it out from within.

We cannot allow the plague of racism to sabotage the shared work that helps save the lives of every person, whoever they may be. Our struggle in the health system is the moral test of society as a whole.

I spoke, and I shouted, and I wept, and I warned, and I gave speeches full of pathos, and I quoted poets and writers, and I marched, and I raged, and I ached, and I hugged, and I quarreled, and I argued, and I was wrong, and I was right, and I fell and got up again – so many times in recent years, and the truth is that I have grown tired, and I can no longer find words; I struggle to make sense of it, to find logic in the madness. I stand astonished before what has become of us, and I remember the warnings of David Grossman and Yuval Noah Harari about three years ago, just a few days after the massacre, and it hurts me in every possible place in my body, and I want to scream to the heart of the heavens. Israel, the national home of the Jewish people, the brand plucked from the fire, has become, in the wake of the Netanyahu massacre, the ugliest, most twisted, most violent and most racist version that anyone could imagine. Daily pogroms in the West Bank, cruel and unhinged violence against the Arab residents of Jerusalem, a deterred Supreme Court that is afraid to rule according to its own precedent and in effect, with its own hands, legitimizes the violation of an Arab citizen’s basic right to be elected, and perverse Jewish mutations who go out to dance hakafot and celebrate in the valley of slaughter at the Nova site, despite the pleas of the bereaved families.