May 14, 1948. B Company, 54th Battalion, Givati Brigade. We had just put up our little tents (which we called “bivouacs”) in the yard of kibbutz Hulda. We were not allowed into the dining hall, the center of the kibbutz.

We were busy preparing for the night’s action. We already knew our objective: Kubeiba, an Arab village east of Ramleh, on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road. I was cleaning my Czech rifle —manufactured for the Wehrmacht and supplied to us courtesy of Stalin—when a rumor went around: Ben Gurion was just making a speech declaring the foundation of our state. For this special occasion, the kibbutz was allowing the soldiers into the dining room, where the communal radio was located.

We were busy preparing for the night’s action. We already knew our objective: Kubeiba, an Arab village east of Ramleh, on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road. I was cleaning my Czech rifle —manufactured for the Wehrmacht and supplied to us courtesy of Stalin—when a rumor went around: Ben Gurion was just making a speech declaring the foundation of our state. For this special occasion, the kibbutz was allowing the soldiers into the dining room, where the communal radio was located.

Frankly, we were not very interested in the windy phrases of some politician in Tel Aviv. We knew that the state was us. If we won the war, there would be a state. If we didn’t, there would be no state, no Tel Aviv, and no us.

But there was one item that aroused some curiosity: What was the new state to be called? Jewish State? State of the Jews? Zion? Judea? Jerusalem? So I went to the dining room. When Ben Gurion ’s easily recognizable voice announced that we were founding the “State of Israel,” I had heard enough returned to my bivouac.

On the way out, I ran into Issar, the brother of a girlfriend of mine. He belonged to another company, which was about to attack another village. We exchanged some small talk. I never saw him again —a few days later he was dead.

That night we attacked the village. When we got there, it was already deserted. I went into one of the primitive houses and found that a pot on the stove was still hot. The villagers must have fled at the last moment.

At that time I could not foresee that these villagers would return to haunt us for decades to come …

* * * *

When you reach the age of sixty, you should know who you are. The State of Israel does not.

Is it a “Jewish state”? The “State of the Jewish People,” as one of our laws says? An Israeli state? A state belonging to all its citizens, at least 20 percent of whom are not Jewish at all? Or a state belonging to its Jewish citizens only? A “Jewish and Democratic State,” as the official doctrine, upheld by the Supreme Court, asserts? And is this not an oxymoron?

And if this is a “Jewish” state, what does that mean? A state expressing the Jewish Spirit—whatever that is? A state where the

majority of the citizens are Jews, now and forever, which would turn it into a “Jewish and Demographic” State? A state where Jews enjoy special privileges?

And anyway, who Is a Jew? Somebody who would have been considered a Jew by the Nazis and marked for annihilation?

Somebody who practices the Jewish religion? Somebody who feels they belong to a Jewish nation? Or, as the Israeli law says, somebody whose mother is Jewish and who has not adopted another religion, as well as somebody who has converted to the Jewish religion in a recognized religious ceremony?  (In the Jewish religion, the father does not count.)

And what are we Jews in Israel? Israelis? Jews? Israeli Jews? Jewish Israelis? These are very different things. The distinctions are not abstract, not at all theoretical. They have very practical implications in our daily life and in the life of our state.

Current polls in Israel show that a third of the population defines itself as Israeli, another third as Jewish and the rest as Jewish Israeli. The population registry of the Interior Ministry refuses to recognize anyone as belonging to the “Israeli nation.” A group of Israelis, including myself, has a case on file against the ministry, demanding that their registration document should drop the entry “Nation: Jewish” and replace it with “Nation: Israeli.”

Sixty years after its birth in the throes of war, the state does not really know what it is. There is hardly any debate about this, aside from some little-noticed academic treatises. By universal, tacit agreement, the issue is simply avoided.

One of the manifest results: on its sixtieth anniversary, Israel is one of just three states in the world without a formal constitution. (The British Constitution, consisting mostly of precedents established over a very long time, exists in all but name. New Zealand is still British in this respect.)

Israel knows no clear separation between religion and state, nor between religion and nation. The status of its Arab citizens is uncertain in practice, if not in theory. The war between us and the Palestinian people just goes on and on. For the whole of its sixty years of existence, Israel has lived officially in a state of emergency. Indeed, the State of Israel and the State of Emergency are twins.

* * * *  

Why? What is the root cause of this uncertainty?

Modern Zionism was born at the end of the nineteenth century. The timing is significant.

Zionist mythology has it that throughout the ages the Jews yearned to “return” to the Holy Land. If so, they certainly kept their longings in check. When hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Spain 515 years ago, most of them eventually settled in the countries of the Muslim Ottoman Sultanate, but only a handful of old Rabbis went to the poor Turkish province of Palestine. When Napoleon called for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, nobody paid any attention. Similar nineteenth-century British and American initiatives did not fare any better.

The real trigger for the revolutionary movement called Zionism was the emergence of nationalism as the main driving force all over Europe. All the new national movements were more or less anti-Semitic. When many of the Jews realized that there was no place for the Jews in the new European nations —from the France of the Dreyfus Affair to the Russia of the pogroms—some of them decided to constitute themselves as a new nation. Instead of

“assimilating” individually, as Theodor Herzl initially proposed, they were to assimilate collectively by becoming a nation of their own on the European model.

Almost all the leading Orthodox Rabbis of the day cursed Herzl. God had punished the Jews by expelling us from His land, and only He could decide whether and when to lift His punishment. By seeking to anticipate the Messiah, the Zionists were committing a mortal sin. Some of the Orthodox even believe that the Holocaust was a sign of God ’s wrath.

The trouble with the Zionists’ resolve to create a national state for the Jews was that there was no Jewish nation in existence. One had to be invented. So invent one they did.

Actually, inventing nations was then developing into a popular international pastime. In his ground-breaking book Imagined Communities (Verso, 2006), Benedict Anderson describes how all modern nations more or less “invented” themselves by rearranging historical facts and myths and creating “national” histories.

The Zionists went much further than that. They pretended that the Jewish Diaspora was also a nation. Actually, the Jews, who were such an anomaly in nineteenth-century Europe, had been quite normal at the time of Christ, when ethnic-religious communities led autonomous lives and had their own jurisdiction. They were then the rule, not the exception.

At that time, a Jew in Alexandria could marry a Jewess in far-away Antiochia, but not the Hellenic lady across the street, who in turn could marry a Hellenic man in Corinth but not her neighbor the Jew. This system continued under the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires (where the communities were called “millets”). It was taken over by the British mandate regime in Palestine, and traces of it can still be detected in the legislation of today ’s Israel.

When Herzl wrote Wir sind ein Volk—we are a people—he was borrowing a term from European reality. But of course the Jews were not ein Volk like the Germans or un peuple like the French. Even today, when we use the term “Jewish people,” it is in a metaphorical sense.

When the Zionists came to Palestine, using a borrowed terminology and a reshaped history, they created a new reality. Today, no one in his right mind would deny that we here in Israel are a nation in a very real sense; a vibrant, thriving nation with a renewed language, creating a new culture, boasting achievements in many fields.

But this nation—what is it? Jewish? Hebrew? Israeli? I have no doubt that it is a new Israeli nation, new as, say, Australia, Canada, and indeed the United States are “new” nations, distinct from their British mother-nation. We, the Jewish Israelis, are as Jewish as the Cohens of New York and the Levys of Los Angeles —but we belong to different nations. Their nation is American, ours is Israeli.

It could not be otherwise. One cannot transplant millions of individuals from one country to another, from one language to another, from one climate to another, from one society to another, from one geopolitical reality to another, and expect them to remain the same.

The Jewish Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora are closely

connected. We have common traditions, a common religion (even atheists like myself are Jewish atheists, not Christian atheists), common memories —foremost among them the terrible, unifying memory of the Holocaust.    

But we are Israelis, belonging to this country, this region, this reality in which we live, work and fight —mostly fight.

If somebody had told us on that sunny day in May 1948 that we would still be fighting the same war in 2008 —indeed, that this war would still dominate our lives, fill the front pages of our daily newspapers, occupy our thoughts and actions —we would have considered them mad.

My comrades and I saw before us a vista of a thriving, peaceful state, democratic, liberal, secular, in the front row of a humanity marching towards a better world. Instead, we are mired in a conflict without end. Many Israelis now believe that this will be our lot for generations to come.

This is the central failure of Israel: it has achieved so very much in so many fields, but it has failed to achieve peace.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been likened to a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. When the early Zionists decided —contrary to the inclinations of Herzl himself—to found their national state in Palestine, they unwittingly started the war which has continued to this very day and which completely warps our character and all our endeavors.

I wrote almost the same on our fifteeth anniversary. I hope that I shall not be obliged to write it again ten years hence —assuming I am still around.

* * * *

Writing this, I think of Issar—the young soldier I ran into in front of the kibbutz dining hall the day the state was proclaimed, who lost his life in the desperate struggle to hold off the Egyptian army on the approaches to Tel Aviv. If he were resurrected today (and it wouldn ’t be the first time that something like this has happened in this country, would it?), as he was then, still eighteen years old, what would he see?

He would hardly recognize the face of the state that had then just come into being. Instead of a society which ranked equality and solidarity and mutual responsibility above all other social values, which had created the unique kibbutzim and a comprehensive system of universal social insurance, he would see a state with a gap between rich and poor wider than in any other developed country, with more than a quarter of its population below the poverty line, with just nineteen families controlling a third of the economy, with a shameless governing group of corrupt politicians in the pay of local and foreign billionaires.

Instead of a vanishing religious establishment, ridiculed by most young Sabras at the time, he would see a huge Orthodox pressure group using its immense power to impose intolerant, reactionary laws on the citizens, while milking them without shame. He would be amazed to see that the “Religious Zionists,” whom he knew as a moderate party on the margin of the political scene, have turned into a fanatical, semi-fascist, racist and Arab-hating monster controlling government policy, gobbling up the land of others and preaching a religion of ethnic cleansing.

He would see that the army—whose name he never knew because he was killed before the Israeli Defense Forces were officially established —this citizen-army he joined in order to defend his home and family, and which boasted of its “purity of arms,” has turned into a brutal army of oppression, a colonial force executing Arabs at will, turning back women in labor and the terminally ill at the checkpoints, terrorizing a whole population and covering up war crimes.

Worst of all, he would see the Zionist movement, which he believed to be an idealistic, humanist liberating force, behaving like a soulless instrument oppressing another people, led by cynical demagogues whose main aim is to choke any peace initiative in order to gobble up more land and cover it with new settlements.

What would Issar have said? Would he have said: “This is not the state I died for, to hell with it!”? I don’t think so. Rather, I imagine him saying: “This is not the state I died for! So let’s get to work and change it, let’s turn it into a state—what was the name again?—a State of Israel we can be proud of.”

The Biblical general whose name I bear, Abner, cried out to his opponent on the eve of battle: “Shall the sword devour forever? Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end? How long shall it be then, ere you bid the people return from following their brethren? ” (2 Samuel, 2:26)

Joab, King David’s commander in chief, did indeed call the battle off. When shall we have the good sense to do the same?