The slick marble walkway between the tarmac and passport control at Ben Gurion airport was lined with poster after poster of missing, returned, or dead hostages. Still wobbly from hours on and off planes and in various layover airports, I walked past their smiling faces beside numbers marking the days since October 7, 2023, photographs of family members, and endless slips of paper demanding BRING THEM HOME NOW. Almost all of the posters were in English. Who are they talking to? I wondered. I did not have to wonder long. An enormous dumpster in the small street behind the apartment in Jaffa in which I was staying had a poster of Trump glued to it which read “END THIS FUCKING WAR.”
I spent two weeks in Israel repeating a version of this exercise everywhere I went — walking or driving past signs issuing demands to the government that had failed the country, and to the government an ocean away that might save it. The posters that had been approved to line the walkway at the airport were far less furious than the ones I saw most places I went. This was a nation disgusted by its leader, and it wanted him to know it.
Israel is familiar to me, it is my family. I love its language and its vistas and its weathers; its pains cut me even at my usual distance, and so do its cruelties. As a Jew in America, I have some indirect power, small but real, to influence its actions — a responsibility I feel viscerally most days of my life, but never more than on this trip looking at English poster after English poster (they were more often in English than Hebrew) begging the American president to make choices that could change Israeli life.
I knew before this trip that Israelis have a much more direct relationship with their government than Americans do. It is apparent to Israelis that the people they elect work for them, that Israelis install politicians because they expect the version of the country in which they want to live to be created by those officials. As a dear Israeli friend put it in our debrief after my return to Washington: “when a right-wing Israeli votes for Ben Gvir, he does so because he knows that if Ben Gvir makes it into the government tomorrow Israel will look entirely different. That’s how small the country is.” (FUCK BEN GVIR stickers are plastered on street signs, lampposts, and even trees around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is another measure of the Americanization of Israel that they curse so naturally in English.) And so the fact that Benjamin Netanayahu is not the man he promised his people he would be, and the fact that he is actively working to undermine the interests of his country, don’t just make Israelis sad and scared — these facts make them furious. Israelis feel as if a thing that belongs to them has been taken away and they want it back. I had occasion before this recent visit to witness that sense of ownership, but now it juxtaposes bizarrely with the mood in American streets. It is impossible not to compare the predicaments of democracy in Israel and America, and I have never before felt the lack of American responsibility over our own democracy, the passivity of the people who know exactly what’s wrong, so acutely. Why don’t we act as if our elected leader is destroying our country? Why aren’t our streets papered with posters demanding our country back? Why are we so damn comfortable?
I went to Israel for a specific purpose, to do research for a project that I intend to write about at length for this journal. That project involved spending a lot of time with left wing Israeli activists who volunteer in the West Bank to defend Palestinian shepherds from violent Israeli settlers — a kind of activism called Protective Presence. I knew that the people I had come to talk to and volunteer beside were a slim minority of a slim minority of left-wing and liberal Israelis. Their views and commitments are shared by very few of their compatriots and I expected to find them much angrier at their government than everybody else. I didn’t. These activists and the rest of the country are not angry about the same things and they are not acting on their angers in the same ways — but this is a country in which virtually every single street bears the scars of the furious fight for Israeli democracy.
American democracy is no less under threat. And yet! America is the most powerful democracy in the world. Every day new developments make clear that it is devolving into an authoritarian state and that our democracy is being weakened perhaps beyond repair, but the streets are quiet and life goes on, almost as if these are good times. Why?
A woman named Dafna took me with her to do Protective Presence in the West Bank. She is a septuagenarian like most of the ladies who do Protective Presence (“we’re retired, we have time“), and has been doing this work for two and a half decades. I sat shotgun as she drove from Palestinian village to Palestinian village from the northern tip of the Jordan Valley all the way down to its southernmost stretch. On the way back up, her daughter called. They chatted on speakerphone for a short while about Passover plans. When she hung up Dafna told me that her daughter is a psychiatrist and that she has been volunteering to work with survivors and families of victims of the Nova Festival, the site of the greatest atrocity among the atrocities of October 7. “We all had to do everything ourselves. The government did nothing. No help organizing the volunteers, nothing.” The iciness with which she relayed that information matched the tone in which she recounted details of her own altercations with Israeli soldiers defending violent settlers.
“It’s so small,” I kept thinking about the territory. There just isn’t that much space, there just aren’t that many people. They all know someone who knows someone who was killed and who has killed. Political reality — political harshness — breathes down the necks of every person on the sliver of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Virtually every political issue relevant enough to make headlines in Israeli newspapers affects virtually every Israeli family.
That isn’t remotely true for Americans. Is that why we are so lazy? Is it because our country is big enough to absorb all the shocks, or because we do not live in a perpetual war-zone? Is safety — now being selectively diminished by the administration for certain groups, none of them white — the quality which facilitates our estrangement from our own governance? Activists around the world are more aware of the American capacity to alter the trajectory of their respective countries than Americans are of our capacity to shape our own fate. I cannot understand it. No matter how I twist it and turn it, I cannot construct an analysis which explains why it is so easy for us to deflect, ignore, evade, stay home, and stay silent. Why are our streets empty?
When I returned to Washington, walking down posterless streets felt eerily emancipatory, as if I had just removed a weighted vest and could now walk free from burden. This freedom also felt sinful, like a tantalizing illusion: the pressures and the abuses still exist, I’m just at liberty to ignore them.
It was strange to feel homesick for the most powerful country in the world, and strange to feel the relief of homecoming when my uber from Dulles passed beneath the Washington Monument’s shadow. It is odd to assimilate into incalculable strength. We speak in the language that foreigners learn to beseech the leaders we elect for help and for mercy. Those leaders work for us. That power belongs to us. We must learn to act like it.