There are lessons for Americans to learn from what’s going on in Israel. One starting point is this 2024 book, Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil.
The book began as essentially a daily notebook of political life in 2023 in Israel, observed from California, where Saul Friedländer lived. He concluded the diary in July 2023, but then, after the October 7 attack from Gaza, and the Israeli response, picked it up again, writing through mid-December 2023. So the diary is presented in two parts: “On the Brink,” and “War.”
David Gushee
Even though it is almost three years later, Friedländer’s commentary remains entirely germane. I will use it here in part to reflect on Israel’s situation on the eve of its elections.
The overall impression left by the first part of the book is that Israel’s democracy as of summer 2023 was “on the brink” of collapse. There is no question that Friedländer attributes most of the blame to the Netanyahu government, which he opens the book describing in this way:
It took me a few days to understand that the political coalition Netanyahu had set up following the (November 2022) election was a monster, a monster with teeth that could devour the country. It took me a few more days to realize that each Israeli — those who lived in the country first and foremost, but also those who lived elsewhere and were attached to it, as I was — had to contribute what they could to stop the monster.
The primary reason this version of Netanyahu rule was the worst yet was this: To cobble together a governing coalition, the prime minister had given crucial roles in his cabinet to the extreme-right-wing characters Bezalel Smotrich (finance minister) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister). Ben-Gvir comes in for constant scorn here, especially for his ultranationalist extremism and his performative cruelty toward Palestinians. For Friedländer, to admit someone like Ben-Gvir into his cabinet was already to bless religiously authorized racism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism.
“Overall, Friedländer sees a society coming apart at the seams.”
Much of the first half of the book offers documentation of the maneuvering of these men for personal power and the advancement of their objectives, as well as the drive of Netanyahu’s government for a “judicial reform” that in Friedländer’s view, and that of millions of Israelis, would gravely weaken the judiciary’s ability to restrain executive and legislative power, thus endangering Israeli democracy.
The diary documents wave after wave of massive protests against the judicial moves, the sundering of Israeli society for/against camps, the involvement of military reservists and other essential personnel in work stoppages to fight these proposals, the strenuous efforts to broker a compromise, and the wiliness and untrustworthiness of Netanyahu in negotiations.
Overall, Friedländer sees a society coming apart at the seams, with a constitutional order on the brink of collapse, and a leader who had completely lost the trust of a substantial portion of the population. He also documents the tragic fact that Israel’s massive pro-democracy movement was held together, in part, by not taking a position on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Parallels
As an American, I saw in Friedländer’s discussion more than a few trenchant parallels to our own country: an untrustworthy leader whose actions and proposals threaten or gut democratic norms, at the head of a coalition whose ideology reeks of religious-tinged ultranationalist xenophobia, with policies demonstrating cruel indifference to the dignity and rights of those targeted, and all of this deeply and bitterly opposed by substantial portions of the population, with move and countermove threatening not just legislative gridlock but constitutional crisis.
“Israel under Netanyahu and America under Trump feel very much like cousins.”
Israel under Netanyahu and America under Trump feel very much like cousins. Quite ill cousins. Can these patients be saved?
Friedländer’s claims
Back to Friedländer. The book contributes a historically informed, carefully observed Israeli view of 2023 Israeli politics and of some of the toxic personalities who have been given a place at the head table.
But Friedländer does more than that. Along the way he offers reflections on some of his experiences in and of Israel since its very founding — there are not many surviving authors still around, still writing, and with the requisite skills. This makes Friedländer’s voice uniquely important.
Saul Friedlander (AP Photo/Eckehard Schulz)
I quote Friedländer directly on some of his most important claims:
Soon after its creation, Israel, consciously or not, became a racist society. For all of us Ashkenazim, it was obvious that the newcomers from North Africa were somehow inferior types.
Friedländer regularly returns to the ways in which Israeli Jews’ own internal racial distinctions, hierarchies and resentments affect current politics, usually for the worse. This was most illuminating.
On Israel’s army:
It is a people’s army, but its handling of the Palestinian population is often brutal, particularly in the almost daily antiterrorism operations. It may be contributing to the noticeable brutalization of Israeli society.
On the post-1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank:
The Occupied Territories became a cancer in the Israeli body politic and, even more so, in Israeli society. As my friend Jacob Fried recently wrote to me: “Israel did not annex the territories; the territories annexed Israel.”
Friedländer says Israel’s unexpected conquest of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula in the Six-Day War of June 1967 inflamed a kind of latent religiosity and even messianism that had not been a dominant part of the political culture before that time. Especially when it came to Jerusalem and the West Bank, it became tempting for Israelis to slip free of U.N. declarations, peace negotiations and realpolitik. People could now entertain religiously loaded dreams of total control of the entire land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Says Friedländer:
Until the Six-Day War, the religious parties that actively participated in successive governments were moderate and accommodating. … But after that victory, they split and one wing became “messianic,” seeing in the conquest of the whole of Eretz Israel the onset of redemption.
Here is Friedländer on the legal and political status of Arab citizens of Israel:
Israel aims at being Jewish and democratic. Let me deal with it in very simplistic terms. Even at first glance, the conjunction is impossible, a contradiction in terms: the Arab citizens of Israel do not have the same rights as Jewish ones.
Friedländer is pointing not to any absence of voting rights for Arab citizens, but to the deeper inequalities embedded in Israel’s political and constitutional order, most notably the right of national self-determination.
On coexistence with the Palestinian people:
I do not know whether the conflict with the Palestinians can still find a peaceful solution; nobody knows. Maybe it never could, from the very beginning of Zionism. But there is no doubt that the continuing domination of the Occupied Territories and constant expansion of settlements fans the flames of conflict. And the brutality of our operations in the territories not only exacerbates Palestinian violence but increasingly brutalizes our own society.
And all this was from Friedländer before October 7. His diary documents (of course) the terror of that day, the horrifying stories that later emerged, and the intense grief and anger of the Israeli population.
But very early Friedländer also begins warning about the dangers of ground operations in Gaza, the risk of very high civilian casualties, inadequate humanitarian provisions, the need to prioritize recovering hostages over punishing Hamas.
These warnings proved prescient. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, nearly 75,000 Gazans have been killed since October 7, 2023.
Friedländer also documents the early signs after October 7 of even more brutal treatment of the West Bank Palestinian population by settlers, with the complicity of security forces:
The evil clown Ben-Gvir is encouraging this (particularly aggressive) policy with the distribution of weapons and creation of self-defense groups all over Israel, particularly in the West Bank settlements. Some of the settlers wear army uniforms and act as if they were soldiers; more often than not, they are backed by the army in their acts of violence against the population. … The coalition’s policy is to use the war situation in order to get a total grip on the Occupied Territories, one way or the other.
This was before the end of 2023, and the problem has continued to the present. The policies overseen by Ben-Gvir have delivered the continual mistreatment of the West Bank Palestinian population, and he has openly advocated Israeli control of Gaza, sovereignty over the West Bank, and policies encouraging Palestinians to emigrate from both territories.
In his diary, Friedländer is realistic about the security threats Israel faces. He frequently documents Palestinian attacks on Jews and, with regard to many specific cases, often uses the phrase “vicious circle” to describe the cycles of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. He notes the indoctrination that sometimes takes place in Palestinian life — schools, for example — that still teach the glories of vengeance and violence against Jews and Israel. But he also notes the Israeli side is doing everything in its power, it seems, to increase Palestinian rage.
“The Israeli side is doing everything in its power, it seems, to increase Palestinian rage.”
The only hope for peace that Friedländer sees is if responsible leaders come off their maximalist dreams for their own side and instead work for peaceful coexistence in a shared land. But maximalism is what is on offer, and Friedländer is especially critical of the “messianic annexationists” who have been holding the whip hand in Israeli politics.
Friedländer is not sure whether Israel has a democratic future, but his analysis suggests that if there is to be such a future, it must begin by turning Netanyahu out of office.
But Friedländer’s critique is not simply a critique of one government. It is also a challenge to the entire society to confront what it has become.
Engaging real rather than mythic Israel
So that is what Friedländer says. He makes sense, and his view of the situation tracks with my own observations and perceptions. I especially respect his viewpoint because of his long personal experience and his acuity as a Holocaust scholar.
In light of all the foregoing, this is what I want to say to my fellow Christians, especially my fellow American Christians: Moral responsibility on our part requires engaging real rather than mythic Israel. This requires addressing what Israel has done, and has become, not evading reality by retreating into our favored narratives about Israel.
I want to name the three mythical or semi-mythical narratives about Israel that I have in mind.
“Moral responsibility on our part requires engaging real rather than mythic Israel.”
First, Israel as Holy Land.
Christians of many generations have thrilled to the biblical stories and have viewed Israel as “The Holy Land.” Still today, many Christians get on airplanes and fly to Israel for Holy Land tours. It is a sacred pilgrimage to go to places named Nazareth, Bethlehem, Sea of Galilee, and Jerusalem.
But these Holy Land tours can easily dull our sensitivity to what is happening in this real territory in real time in the year 2026. While some Christian Holy Land tours engage seriously with contemporary Palestinian Christians and Palestinian communities, many of us American Christians would prefer to visit the land of our Bible maps and our religious imaginations.
Second, Israel as player in Christian End Times theology.
The problem becomes exponentially worse when it comes to that brand of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity that has integrated the birth of modern Israel into its dispensational End Times theology. This vision of Israel is equally — actually, even more — mythic, blocking realistic understanding of daily events in Israel through the adoption of a fantastical End Times scenario that somehow always ends up blessing Israeli maximalism, ignoring or dismissing Palestinian rights, and being perfectly sanguine about the prospect of war in the Middle East.
Third, Israel as answer to the Holocaust.
This hits far closer to home for me.
People in my part of the Christian and academic world were not much attracted to Bible tourism and never to End Times dispensationalism.
But our version of Israel’s story usually began in Europe with centuries of culpable Christian antisemitism culminating in a European-wide genocide organized by the Nazi regime with the odious collaboration of many Christians in state power and in local communities. This terrible narrative of Christian failure engendered enormous sympathy for the modern state of Israel as a rebirth from the ashes of the genocide that our “Christian civilization” did so much to make possible.
Friedländer lived that story. He writes about how he always will have a visceral loyalty to Israel because that is where his life — and the life of the Jewish people — was rebuilt. “I remain viscerally attached to the country where I arrived of my own volition, as a 15-year-old, post-Shoah orphan. … For many of my vanishing generation, the attachment remains irrational and unshakable.”
Many of us of an older generation of historically aware — dare I say, historically repentant — Christian clergy and scholars shared a Christian version of that visceral loyalty.
I remember visiting the Shoah museum, Yad Vashem, in Israel, and experiencing the trajectory of the museum as running from Holocaust as death to Israel as rebirth. From Auschwitz to Eretz Israel. It made sense. It was the narrative many of us have inhabited for many decades.
It is not fair to say that story is mythic. But it was a story that, as many of us received and understood it, did not focus on the Palestinian people’s own story, land, dignity, rights and suffering.
Eighty years later, it also can be a way of avoiding historical and political realism and moral responsibility in relation to what is happening right now.
The moral point of view requires living in the reality of the present, evaluating everyone’s actions not on the basis of mythic narratives but instead on the plumblines of justice, dignity, and peace, and then attempting to do one’s part to create such a reality.
It is just as true of the U.S., by the way. Here, 11 long years into the Trump era, we must deal realistically with what our country has done and has become —and we must figure out what it must do now to get better, to act better and be better.
No more myths. Moral and political realism, leading to constructive action in the real world of politics, law and culture.
David P. Gushee serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He also is author of 30 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust; Kingdom Ethics; Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies; Changing Our Mind; and The Moral Teachings of Jesus.