On the country’s Independence Day, the nostalgia of liberal Israelis for a better, earlier state is a comforting illusion. The Nakba and the occupation were there from the beginning
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
cc: Wikimedia Commons
Israel is celebrating its 78th Independence Day this week. This will not be among the best of its independence days, in a country that is no longer young.
In my childhood, this day was, for us new Israelis, a day of pride and joy.
As a son of the state’s first generation, just a few years after the Holocaust and after the state’s founding, I remember my father taking the folded national flag out of the cupboard and hoisting it on the balcony of our flat. All the surrounding balconies flew flags, except for the Lebel family’s – they were ultra-Orthodox and did not raise the flag of the Zionist state. I felt a sense of pride in both my father and the flag.
At the time, we knew nothing about the Nakba. No one told us about it, nor about the military rule under which Israel’s Arab citizens lived. We never asked ourselves who had lived in the ruined houses by the roadside, or what had become of them. We looked at the remains of Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods as if they were part of the landscape. In the evening, we would go out to celebrate in the city streets.
Independence Day eve was the only night of the year when our parents allowed us to stay out late without restriction. Independence Day was a holiday.
Decades later, everything looks different. The word Nakba has gradually entered public consciousness, even if among a small minority of Israelis, and alongside the historical guilt felt by even fewer of us. Meanwhile, events of recent years have led some among us to feel ashamed of our state.
It took me some years more to understand that these events, however recent or long past, cannot be separated.
At the beginning of this state was the Nakba: our day of celebration was the day of another people’s historic catastrophe, a people who were here before us. Everything since has been bound up with what came before. What began in 1948 has not ended, not even in 2026.
An unending Nakba
From the Nakba to today, the basic principles by which Zionism operates have not changed, nor has the policy of successive governments of the Jewish state. The Nakba has never ended; it has merely altered in form. How disheartening it is to think that the values that led to the Nakba 78 years ago are still driving the State of Israel in 2026 – the same principles, the same objectives, the same methods.
Now a regional power and the closest ally of the most powerful superpower in the world, nothing has changed in Israel’s overall outlook since it was a day-old state. It still believes it can live by the sword – and only by the sword – and that it has no alternative but a life sustained by the sword.
It still sees military force as the sole guarantee of its existence and security. It still advances a policy of absolute Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.
It still casts itself as a victim – a regional power speaking of existential threats. It is still convinced that absolute justice is on its side. It still imagines that all Arabs are born to kill, and that the only thing preoccupying the Arab world is how to throw the Jews into the sea.
The same beliefs, the same principles as then, in 1948.
And beneath the surface, religious beliefs continue to ferment; indeed, they have grown much stronger over these 78 years: God gave the land to the Jews, to them alone, and this biblical promise is the title deed to the land – divine proof of exclusive sovereignty, even in the eyes of Jews who define themselves as secular.
While the principles have remained the same, Israel has also changed over the years of its independence. Very few of those changes have been for the better.
The lament of many Israelis who now long for the good old Israel – before the Likud came to power – is largely illusory: an act of self-deception. It was not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who invented the occupation, nor was it his party that introduced Jewish supremacy. These began in that good old Israel – the socialism of the Israeli Labor Party and the “enlightened occupation”.
After 1948, after 1967, 7 October 2023 marked Israel’s most fateful turning point yet.
In the two and a half years since then, Israel has eliminated a large part of the region’s leadership, invaded and bombed nearly every neighbouring country, and unleashed its military force without any sense of proportion, committing war crimes on a wide scale. On this 78th Independence Day, only a few in Israel acknowledge this.
Here, it seems, there will never be a truth and reconciliation commission. There is no genuine reckoning, not even over Israel’s transformation into a pariah state. “Why does the world hate us?” is dismissed as an illegitimate question in the public conversation. The world is antisemitic, full stop. This is the prevailing mood on this Independence Day.
Never a democracy
Israeli democracy was never a true democracy – and this 78th Independence Day is as good a moment as any to say so plainly. The only time Palestinians were not subjected to Israeli military rule was for a few months between 1966 and 1967. Until then, it applied to Israel’s Arab citizens; since 1967, it has applied to the occupied territories. A state with a permanent military regime is not a democracy. Full stop.
The same is true of apartheid: it was not established in recent years. It dates back to the early days of the state, with a strong push for its consolidation after the occupation of 1967.
Throughout its history – before the 1967 occupation and certainly after it – Israel has never accepted the premise that Palestinians are entitled to equal rights between the River Jordan and the sea.
More fundamentally, Israel has never regarded Palestinians as human beings equal to Israeli Jews. That was, and remains, the root of the problem – and barely anyone addresses it.
The only substantive change in this picture in recent years is this: in place of a sense of the few against the many – David (Israel) versus Goliath (Arabs) – a new Israeli megalomania has emerged. It has reached its peak in the aftermath of 7 October 2023. Now Israel evidently believes that everything is permitted. Now it recognises no limits – not in the unrestrained use of its military power, nor in its lack of respect for the sovereignty of most other states in the region.
On this Independence Day, a heavy cloud hangs over Israel’s darkening skies. The society is polarised almost entirely around a single issue: Netanyahu – yes or no. Almost everything else is barely mentioned. On most other matters, there seems to be broad underlying agreement. There is no Jewish opposition to the war, to any war, nor to the occupation, or to apartheid.
Gaza concerns only a few; the same is true of the West Bank, which has also been transformed beyond recognition under the cover of the recent wars. There, Israel has succeeded – by means of violent settlers and an army that works in tandem with them – in extinguishing the last remaining prospects for a viable Palestinian state. This, too, interests only a few in Israel.
Darkening skies
Despite the absence of any serious debate or soul-searching, there is a sense that the skies are darkening. Even the most strident propagandists of the fascist right are beginning to grasp the scale of the threat facing today’s Israel, after it has opened too many war fronts and failed to achieve its objectives in any of them.
Gaza and Lebanon are not success stories but unnecessary and criminal wars, which have brought Israel no gains – only high costs that it may struggle to sustain over time.
The United States is gradually slipping from Israel’s grasp; Donald Trump may yet turn against it, and in any case, the president who replaces him in less than three years – Democrat or Republican – will pursue a different policy towards this major ally. The days when America sat comfortably in Israel’s pocket are over, perhaps for good.
Europe, too, is waiting for a signal from the United States that will allow it to shift its own policy towards Israel. There, as well, patience is running out with an Israel that is seen as occupying, aggressive and megalomaniacal.
Israel has not fared well in recent years. The more wars it has waged, the more territory it has occupied and the more people it has driven from their homes – there are now some six million displaced in the Middle East as a result of Israel’s actions, some of whom have nowhere to return to – the more rapidly its international standing has deteriorated.
A state that has systematically thumbed its nose at every institution of the international community – at every resolution, at international law, and at the opinions of its closest allies – is charting a course towards the isolation of apartheid South Africa. That is a trajectory it will struggle to reverse.
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